The Brooklyn Rail

It is hard to believe, but Florian Pumhösl has begun to dig even deeper into the strata of modernism—this time, though, his excavations are real and not just figurative. For more than two decades, the Austrian artist has methodically explored the legacy of abstraction. In series after series, he engages with its different facets, conflicts, claims, and aspirations, mostly focusing on forgotten aspects and unfamiliar appearances in paintings that emphasize line and geometric shapes and are usually made on canvas but can also be on glass, plaster panels, and linoleum.

Recently, he has applied these concerns to work that has adopted a more sculptural note. In the warped reliefs of 2022, Pumhösl took discarded, irregularly shaped lead sheets that were originally used for roofing, folded them, and then hid the surface structure behind a thick coat of color. Tightly squeezed together and about an inch high, the folds make for elevated lines, thus subtly transforming the monochrome plane into a relief with positive and negative spaces, in which the resulting shadows create color, line, and shape.

Lithosphere, his latest exhibition currently on display at Miguel Abreu, in a way reverses this approach by moving from construction to subtraction. Rather than positive space, it now is the negative that forms relief and lines. Pumhösl glues up to four sheets of cardboard on top of each other and removes sections of individual layers with an X-ACTO knife. In order to increase the irregular formation of the edges and make them look more organic, he slightly burns them with lighters. Finally, he covers the entire work with gray, purple, or white paint. At first, and from a distance, the resulting subtle lines appear drawn on a monochrome ground. With time, however, it becomes apparent that they result from removal, and thus evoke the sensation of moving into depth. What is more, since the light inevitably hits the picture plane unevenly and from an angle, the impression of the edges changes in time and place. In areas in which the contours of the subtracted sections point in opposite directions or face each other, the directly illuminated ridges contrast with those that create shadows.

By likening the layers of cardboard to the tectonic plates comprising the lithosphere, Pumhösl sets out to excavate what lies hidden beneath the surface, pointing to the multifacetedness of the earth’s crust. In this respect, his look into the interior may even contain a referential and thus figurative dimension. In fact, Pumhösl carefully prepares the cut-outs in drawings, which he then transfers to the final work. Yet, unlike the young Ellsworth Kelly—another artist obsessed with the legacy of modernism, who, in order to circumvent both the arbitrariness of the sign and composition, used real life elements such as slide-windows as starting points in order to arrive at his abstractions—Pumhösl identifies abstractions in the real world by imagining what contours in the lithosphere might look like. Rather than copying or abstracting from, he emulates the accidental structure of silhouette in geology. The haphazard appearance of the shapes in nature accounts for the arbitrariness of his lines. Because non-referential, Pumhösl’s contours are referential precisely because the lines in the lithosphere are irregular, as well, and do not follow any apparent logic or derive from any shapes or forms beyond themselves. With regard to the history of modernism that has concerned Pumhösl for the longest time, this dialectic implies that the language of abstraction may indeed be universal. But because of its hidden yet constitutive referential structure, only at the price of the utopian dimension modernism had originally aimed for.