2009 : Mai 36 Gallery Zurich

Painting means to make what I see comprehensible to myself. I paint the things within my reach. They are the basis for making discoveries. The challenge is to work against simply succeeding. The more the picture eludes control and loses its calculated options, the closer I can get to a formulation that feels right. (Matthias Zinn)

We are happy to be able to present the first exhibition of Matthias Zinn at Galerie Mai 36. The artist – born 1964 in Tegernsee, now living in Berlin – has with his drawings and paintings gained increasing recognition these past years.

Matthias Zinn finds his subjects in his immediate living and working environment; he observes them on a daily basis and can study them in depth. Whether it is a table with the obligatory painting utensils, an easel, a chair in the room, a shoe or a shirt thrown carelessly on the floor, a view out of his studio window onto the houses and facades opposite, a solitary tree, a deserted playground or simply a hill. Familiarity with things and places is necessary so that they can turn unfamiliar to the artist in the act of painting them. Zinn’s motifs, which form the starting point for a concentrated, introspective painting process, are literally close at hand […]. He takes time for thorough studies before painting the objects and places, going through a phase of internalization in order to gain some distance and leave the concrete appearances of the world of things behind him before, with the means of painting at his disposal, arriving at the essence (Stefanie Kasper, Wahrnehmung mittels Malerei” in: Ambigu. Zeitgenössische Malerei zwischen Abstraktion und Narration, Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, 2010, p. 88.).

Whereby Matthias Zinn’s oeuvre moves away from the seen and experienced reality in order to arrive at the essence in the world of things. Reality is captured and translated into an autonomous painterly form, literally abstracted – and this not only formally, but in a genuinely conceptual approach: In the end, Matthias Zinn’s priority is always to manifest the autonomy of painting.

For me the question of figuration or abstraction is not decisive. Finding a pictorial answer is an abstract process in which both poles come together. I can only translate the idea I have of an object into a picture if I approach it from a non-objective angle, in order to then arrive again at an objective formulation. (Matthias Zinn)