2017 : Köpfe – Mai 36 Gallery Zurich

Heads – that is the title of Matthias Zinn’s current body of work. But he is less concerned with the head as a physiognomic phenomenon, rather with the forces and energies that make the appearance, the perception of the human head as a counterpart tangible.

In this exhibition at Zurich based Mai 36 Gallery Zinn shows for the first time sculptural works in dialogue with his paintings. Their origin lies in the two-dimensionality of the pictorial surface, but seek a visualization of the immaterial energies and forces that goes beyond it.

Zinn deliberately uses poor materials in his actual sculptures, materials from the studio environment, in order to direct the focus towards the temporary, the ephemeral and also the form itself as an essential carrier of message.

In his most recent work phase, his specific world of motifs have been joined by a number of human heads, portrayed frontally, from behind, from the side, alone or in bold compositional combinations with the usual inventory of objects. The heads remain mostly reduced to a schema, their compactness one of archaic force. Whereby to Zinn the question is less that of a concrete individual, the presentation of an emotion or of a state of mind, and more the counterpart per se, the recording of a human face as one of the primal foundations of painting.

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)