Julia Gruner's first solo exhibition at Taubert Contemporary comprises three groups of works that illustrate the artist's consistent questioning of the medium of painting. The basis for this is a genuine interest in a wide variety of materials, which Gruner subjects to meticulous material experiments and analyses. Her curiosity about the core components of her medium extends to the macro level of color. With her delight in constant transformation, she thus penetrates to the painterly parameters themselves. 

They look like seat cushions, lounging around leisurely in the gallery space: Julia Gruner's "Lazy Paintings" can be understood as a commentary on the constant production paradigm of our society, or rather the clichéd ideas of 'idle' artistic production. The three-dimensional paintings, moved from the wall to the floor, feature unusual color combinations in the best sense of the word: There's poison green next to bright pink and darkened reds. Turquoise is infused with dreamy sky blue and sunny yellow. Purple bursts out of a gray color surface. The quirky textures are created by combining water-based acrylic paint with various oils (in this case, peanut oil) that repel each other through their chemical characteristics. In ever-changing combinations, the artist explores the specific reaction of the two opposing painting mediums and draws from them new structures of the color cushions. 

The "Domestic Paintings" (since 2020) have their origins in the first Corona lockdown. Cut off from the studio, Gruner used materials available in her own four walls during this period and altered them from their intended purpose as painting materials. The artist mixed various household liquids such as cleaning products, cooking oil, nail polish, or honey to create colorful amalgams, which she applied to a foil, scanned in high resolution, and finally printed the resulting image. In view of the beautifully curved "brushstrokes" created by toothpaste, for example, and the impression of being confronted with abstract painting, the artistic work itself is at the same time subtly thematized. 

Products thus become color in the "Domestic Paintings" - a contrast to the preoccupation with color as product in the "Lazy Paintings." In Gruner's works, color is generally understood as a broad spectrum ranging from industrially produced artists' supplies to everyday substances such as food. This contains a fundamental theme of Julia Gruner's artistic works: Reflecting on the categorizations "natural" and "artificial" - and the connotations and hierarchies attached to them, such as "useless/productive" or "healthy/unhealthy." The exhibition title "Allergic to peanuts" illustrates this once again. Is the food intolerance to peanuts called up in it to be evaluated as an alienation from nature or simply a clever, "natural" reaction of the skin? The artist's credo is that generalizations are no way to combat the complexity of interrelationships, neither in life nor in art. 

Last but not least, the ongoing project of "Painting Water Tiles" is presented in the exhibition. The starting point for this was the question of the environmental compatibility of so-called painting water. After all, this solution, which is produced when painting utensils are washed out, contains liquid plastic through the color binder acrylic, but is usually simply fed into the household water cycle. The artist found that there was no knowledge or awareness of alternative disposal. So she decided on a third way, which allows useless things to become productive: she binds the painting water with plaster and pours it into empty sausage and cheese packaging. After each working day, a new tile is thus created, which also refers to many hours of work in the studio. 

– Romina Dümler

Allergic to Peanuts

Take 3D Tour