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Shuttling or dancing back and forth between form and surface, Ina Gerken is developing an indissoluble body of work that is surprising and unique in its artistic nonconformity. Emerging amid the gestural scribbles and layerings are streaks, tangles, grids, structures, patterns, waves, clouds, stripes, fans, and much more besides, whose consistency and contingency are virtually impossible to describe in words. Rather, her painting displays an infinite visual concision, whose formlessness of colorful forms is only very inadequately described by the quality of abstract ornamental tangles of lines. Natural chaos or chaotic nature in all its inimitable beauty, a glimpse into the essence of things and world with no clear up or down. We are tempted to believe that surreal beings whose forms we can only guess at but never name inhabit Gerken’s highly suggestive and strangely organic-looking visual worlds, worlds that at the same time cast sidelong looks at an American-looking and—if the allusion is not too bold—female abstract expressionism. (…)
(…) At work is a kind of geology of the gaze—mountains, sediments, leaves, ferns—that comes to light again and again and always in new ways, in the same way that the sound of a Don Glen Van Vliet, under the pseudonym Captain Beefheart, expands the palette/keyboard of techniques and styles with his experimental rock music mingling blues, avant-garde jazz, country, fusion, Sprechgesang, punk, acid rock, and rockabilly. In this triad with Ina Gerken, a general recognition of the infinite potential of image and music is miraculously set resonating with many, in the best sense, thoughtful (joyful, sometimes melancholy) vibrations, dense movements that she executes and balances out around the image, which move us inwardly and motivate us as well. Image and sound unfold in endless timbres within the incomprehensible universe of abstraction. Her paintings invite us to contemplate the outside and inside, to look upon painting and world, and that makes us quiet. Pure sense perception in the ethereal earthly realm. Nevertheless, I recommend looking loudly, intensely, and long—and live, of course, blissful in Gerken’s garden.