The Brooklyn Rail

David Ostrowski has somewhat of a cult status among painters. His “F” series continues on in the memory and discussions of painters here in New York, brought up in the more wistful moments of painters reminiscing about the moments when painting felt like it understood something about culture and about itself. They were so cool–devastating in how little they had to say but rich in meaning and how much they had to offer. I was able to meet with David after his current show was finished being installed—a rare moment of finality and exhaustion; a moment of one series coming to an end and another starting to form in the distance.

Ostrowski works within multiple series, what he calls “work groups,” that take decades to conclude, if they ever do. His “Parliament” series has been ongoing since 2009, and our time together was affected by this presence of this time and its conclusion. At moments, we both found the limitations of language to address the work; and gradually came to recognize that painting, when it does the trick, sometimes eats away at the words around it. What was left is my own sense that Ostrowski and his work have often been misunderstood, that labels and categorization are insufficient, and that anti-style painting still feels like a way forward.

Andrew Woolbright (Rail): In preparation for our talk, I had a chance to talk to a number of painters and ask them what they think about your work and something that came up multiple times was this feeling that your work, specifically the “F” series, feels really canonical; like it has really situated itself as a significant point within painting’s history. I’m wondering how much your education and your community played a role in leading up to that work. You were taught by Albert Oehlen. Do you feel like your work reacts to his in some way? I think in some ways your work is kind of an antithesis to his idea of “ugly painting.”

David Ostrowski: The König Bookstore and the library at the Academy of fine Arts Düsseldorf were significant sources of inspiration during my studies, providing a way to see what was happening in contemporary art recently. As far as studying with Oehlen goes, it was valuable to engage in this discourse about painting. It was important and instructive for me to see a lot of art in order to develop a sense of what didn't resonate with me.

I’m open to the idea of “bad painting,” but I also see great potential in the beauty and poetry of a work. I distrust paintings that appear too obvious, whether they are seen as kitsch or well-executed quotes. It's about finding one's own language, which is challenging because I work intuitively and I try to develop new vocabulary.

Rail: Since you’ve brought it up—how do you feel you are using pastiche, and specifically how you are using it to explore kitsch? I don’t feel like you’re dismissing kitsch or mocking it, but I’m wondering how you define kitsch and why it’s starting to kind of accumulate into a subject in the parliament (owl) paintings?

Ostrowski: Owls are popular in gift shops and as souvenirs, often as collectibles or decorative items, and they possess all the qualities of a kitschy, banal figure. Kitsch is the opposite of what I am, so I am very interested in the context shift. How can I make it my own? Can I turn the tide? I don't categorically reject it; after all, I also listen to Michael Bublé in the studio. Like Adorno said, it’s “stupidly comforting.” Isn’t it?

Rail: That stupid comfort is always there. I think it’s interesting that you keep it on the periphery in what you’re listening to while you paint and then the paintings walk the line. That makes me think of how Oehlen speaks about the cliches of expression and painting; his rejection, maybe even his fear, of being this earnest, expressive painter or becoming another cliche of freedom. And I don’t know, I don’t think your work is a romantic idea of painting, but I don’t feel like you’re working out of that same kind of negative capability that he is. Your painting isn’t a satire of painting or parodistic, it’s complicated. It’s difficult to decipher the degree of separation you have from painting, if any. How do you feel about the proximity, I guess, the distance between you and the idea of painting?

Ostrowski: I would certainly describe myself as a romantic painter. Always looking for poetry in my respective groups of works, and I strive to trigger the greatest possible affects with the least possible means. My romantic idea is not to explain my works. What's more important is that my works activate something in the viewer.

Rail: Do you feel like this is something that is shared between other painters that have come out of Cologne? I’m thinking of Jutta Koether and Charline von Heyl who seem to kind of wince when the conversation becomes preoccupied with their subject matter. I’m thinking of von Heyl in an interview with Isabelle Graw where she says that some people might see a face in her paintings, but it's paint, like it’s not about seeing an image—or it can be but she’s not concerned either way. I ask because currently, in America, everything feels flooded with meaning. I feel like we are in very narrative and allegorical times, especially in painting. There’s the obvious question which is “why owls?” And yet I feel like there’s the very real possibility it would be missing the whole point of the show to ask that—that it’s not about them, and I find that to be vital too. Is this where that idea of the non-motif comes in? How do you define that or work within that idea?

Ostrowski: I treat the figure of the owl like I do my abstractions: as pure shape that coalesce through line, gesture, and color. It's not important to me what people recognize, but to abstract figuration in order to create form. It's always about leaving things ambiguous. On the one hand, I'm interested in finding a formal language that I haven't seen before, and on the other hand, in giving meaning to forms. And to put shapes in a different context.

Rail: And that brings in the cleverness of the name of this series and exhibition. “Parliament” implies this configuration of gestures or you acting as a ventriloquist to a parliament of painters within a single painting; a host of ideas of painting in each canvas. And you've been working with owls as the reason for this form since 2008.

Ostrowski: A group of owls is called a “parliament of owls.” This phrase has its origins in the 1950s children's classic The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. The owls can be understood by me as placeholders for people from the worlds of art, sports, and business. When I painted my first owl work in 2009, I found it amusing to be observed during the painting process. My secret wish was, at times, to use these works to overthrow high authorities. This still seems relevant to me. During the opening here in New York, when I looked at the paintings in the context of the visitors, I thought: the owls could be us.

Rail: I like the idea of irony and pastiche being this language or mechanism to challenge authority. This strategic position of containing multitudes and remaining indecipherable. Do the paintings of owls require a different mood to be in to make them than the “F” paintings or the “hanger” paintings?

Ostrowski: There's no difference. My CD player has played the same music for years. What is new, I started listening to crime podcasts recently. One newer owl piece has the title: “ZEIT Verbrechen (Parliament Paintings), which references a true-crime podcast from Germany.

Rail: Is it productive to ask what the first thought was in choosing the owl? I was just reading W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and he says that artists and poets have penetrating eyes, and then had an image of an owl’s eye on the following page. I think Freud and Bacon were both described as having owl-like features.

Ostrowski: I am definitely a night person. But since becoming a father and having to take my son to school, not so much anymore. When my studio burned down and friends temporarily set me up in a basement storage near an underground garage, I felt watched by the incoming cars. This might have been the trigger for these creatures. Back then, I mostly painted at night.

Rail: I’m sorry about your studio fire. We share that experience in common and I relate to that same vulnerability, of feeling exposed after. It’s interesting that that vulnerability began it, but there’s also a portrait of George W. Bush in one and what looks to be the face of a gremlin in another…maybe more predatory forms of looking or invitations to think about the shock of surveillance, or the transformation of something safe into a form of threat.

Ostrowski: The gremlin and Bush are a trick to test the viewer's perception and concentration. In general, I always see my paintings as suggestions. Gizmo and the evil Gremlins aren't even owls. But I claim they are. The Bush work is from 2019, actually.

Rail: I love that you’re complicating attention. That’s fascinating. I feel like a lot of painters are thinking about the attention a painting accumulates, and in a way that’s an aesthetic concern, because it’s really about understanding desire. But when you sneak something in, you’re jolting the somnambulist awake. It kind of negates the aesthetic experience. It’s acknowledging the experience of painting outside of it through a rupture.

Ostrowski: It's a delicate balance between provocation and telling the same story content-wise. I like to lean way out of the window.

Rail: [Laughs] It feels like language plays a significant role in your work, both in the titling but also as balancing different languages of marks. It’s like glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. For the paintings of hangers and also the “F” series, it seems like it achieves more of a harmony, whereas the owls really feel like proposals for different ways of making a painting within the same canvas. Do you develop criteria for yourself and the way you paint? Are there things that you believe make a painting, say, become an illustration or become decorative? Is their avoidance or something you’ve found you need to do to make these into paintings and specifically, your paintings?

Ostrowski: Each of my works and each series of works is a suggestion. Formally, there may be differences, but in terms of content, they are personally the same for me. The choice of the letter F is intuitive. It came simultaneously with the desire to draw a line. A line with a beginning and an end. The F in my “F” paintings is also pure form, reflecting my approach to painting gestures. The F, the H, the W, the N are abstract forms to me.

Bringing the theme of decoration into a painting and making it a meaningful piece is challenging. To make the owls work, I need to combine various visual styles from realistic to painterly to pictographic to cartoonish. For me, it’s like cooking a soup with the right spices. I try to balance the painting and make it appealing. For me, it's painting in its purest form. It’s about color and composition. It’s a deft play with layering, overpainting, and placement. Regarding the owls, if the style becomes too one-sided, it can drift into decoration or triviality. That fine line interests me.

Rail: There are lots of tightropes. Finding the subtle zones within taste. Are there moments where you were able to surprise yourself in this show? Are there moments when something happened that you really felt like you pulled something surprising off?

Ostrowski: The element of surprise is a very rare moment. I'm not naive enough to expect it.

Rail: But specifically I guess I’m wondering about the installation. These are all discreet and separate, which isn’t typical. This feels like a very classical installation.

Ostrowski: There is an analogy between the townhouse aesthetics at Sprüth Magers and the owl works. This only intensifies the aspect of supposed decoration. There’s a subtle hint of cynicism in this. A classic white cube scenario, on the other hand, is more neutral. The townhouse architecture here at my current show, with its wooden panels, stucco, and fireplace, acquires something theatrical and, in a strange way, reinforces the owls, which I'm not necessarily used to. So, it’s as if it were a staging.

Rail: Does it feel comfortable yet? Thinking of your show at Ramiken where you intentionally hung the paintings nearly touching each other, so that each implied the painting to its left and right. It’s beyond even Derrida’s idea of trace, you’re confronted with each painting being one in a larger system. You're made constantly aware that there's a painting before it, after it, and there’s more to come. They were leaning on each other, while these weren’t.

Ostrowski: At Ramiken, the technician took the works out of the crate and randomly leaned them against the wall on one side of the gallery. Mike Egan, the gallerist, sent me a photo to confirm that the works had arrived safely. We both agreed that the installment should remain exactly like that—just installed. I usually need to be in the exhibition space to decide how to place the works, but this was a special case.

Rail: But to me that show felt almost heartbreaking or existential in comparison to this one. Like it had gravitas, a sense of something no longer being here. But the owls feel more humorous, and clever—a prompt that makes the excuse to make an image of something recognizable that is about painting. Do you think of that show having a heaviness to it as opposed to this show, that might have more levity to it? Or critical joy?

Ostrowski: For me, both exhibitions are humorous. The Hanger works imply a deceptive emptiness that becomes auratically loaded up through repetition and different painting styles. Furthermore, the installation supported the irony of the works. I find the intensity level of both shows to be very similar, but the owls pretend to be cheerful.

Rail: That feels like it shares something with the “F” series, that is really investing and making an effort to understand the first move. Like the underpainting is where the impulse is. There's something to that, that feels consistent, where you are taking the first move seriously and trying to understand why you put the first mark down where you put it, or why the art handler took them out and placed them all side by side. It’s maybe an acknowledgment or suspicion that after the first mark, each decision becomes editing. Or doubling. Or undoing.

Ostrowski: It is mostly intuition, and sometimes a bit of luck. Years ago, I had a show in Berlin and painted four large four-meter canvases without even knowing if they would fit in the space. In fact, it was only half a centimeter away from not fitting. I never work with plans or sketches for installations. I always decide on the spot.

Rail: Is that a rule?

Ostrowski: For me, the exhibition space is part of the work, and I can only feel that on site.

Rail: Is there anything else that you're dealing with? Anything that helps give you the freedom to make a painting?

Ostrowski: Depression.

Rail: I’ve always found it more difficult to make a painting when I’m not. It feels like there’s an overarching interest in complicating impermanence and permanence, and maybe changing the direction between those two poles at the last moment, and that’s where I feel that channeled as a force in your work. Whether it’s the burns of spray paint on linen or the moments where you are cutting and splicing the canvas, there's something in your work about this tension that happens from a quick gesture that is something you can’t undo. Speaking only for myself, I think you can become fearless in a very specific way when you have depression because you’re not holding onto anything too tightly. Something I really enjoy about this show are these errant textures that emerge from underneath. They don't do anything to create an image or a picture but they have presence. They imply the painting could have gone a number of different ways or maybe these textures just never got the script. They don’t add up to anything. They're just the evidence of what you painted over or the cut canvas that you're applying. Displaying failure, monumentalizing mistake.

Ostrowski: For a long time, I deluded myself into thinking I could paint mistakes. But as soon as you start doing that, they are no longer mistakes. At some point, you take a spray paint test stroke, and then you stick those scraps of paper and canvas that are lying around the studio onto the canvas. That’s why I hardly throw anything away. Everything could complete a painting. I definitely work on creating the illusion that they might be volatile mistakes.

Rail: It’s an illusion but it’s also a fixation. It makes me think of how anxiety is exchanged now. I think about this whole anxiety aesthetic, of memes that will say something like: When you lay awake at night remembering the dumb thing you said at a party four years ago. Your work seems to embrace the anxiety that comes with the uncalculated decision, and sees it as poetics, or maybe it’s a license to say so what? So what if it does keep us up all night? Maybe that’s important.

Ostrowski: That's one of the reasons why I don't like going out in public, especially to openings or dinners. Afterwards, I always feel like I've said something wrong or behaved inappropriately. In a way, you’re right; it’s possible that this misery also emanates from my work. This kind of uncertainty. What was the question?

Rail: It’s more of an observation. Since paintings aren’t necessary, when they draw our attention it reveals that they are a symptom of culture. I do think the “F”-Series is canonical, but then what is it a symptom of? The way things felt after the ’08 global economic collapse? Or maybe the channeling or anticipation of a moment when anxiety is diagnosed to the point it is being considered to no longer be a diagnosis. Maybe this is why they resonate and feel important to many of us.

Ostrowski: Looking back, it’s possible that the “F” series was a complete surrender. And maybe that allowed for a new beginning. Emptiness holds an incredible number of possibilities. I don't see nothing in it, but quite the opposite. To quote my press release from the last show Concerned with things as their own composition: “Perhaps the emptiness was never a reduction, but rather an expansion.” I contradict the assumption that nothing is nothing—I see less in a painting full of owls than in a painting with a single line.

Rail: Well and the emptiness seems to also be in the action of you getting away from the interpretation. It's more like Duchamp’s notion of the creative act (l’etat brut): you do the thing quick and half-formed and then the audience becomes co-conspirators in its interpretation as a work. Or it’s like Badiou describing an event. The event changes our direction, but we can’t hold onto our idea of self and also experience it. I feel like that's not really where a lot of American painting is right now, that often functions closer to an idea of communication theory. I feel like you’re dissolving the presence of the artists so that there can actually be an event or an encounter by the audience.

Ostrowski: Primarily, I am focused on the artwork as an autonomous piece. The work should express something on its own, so no explanation is needed. Resolutions don’t captivate me; I am interested in questions. As a producer, I prefer to play as little a role as possible. It seems like in America, one learns to explain, to describe their work. I get the impression that art education in America for independent artists is more theoretical and requires them to be able to talk about their work. At least when I studied, that wasn't a big part of it. I also believe that students today are exposed to different responsibilities than we were back then. Looking back, it seems like we could simply paint beautiful pictures.

Rail: I agree with that. I think painting is like philosophy in that it’s searching for the right questions to ask. I still seek out the possibility of painting as a discourse. And the community that comes from seriously engaging with it. As you said, it’s hard to get the overview, but I think things are generated in the attempt. I also think there’s a lot of bad painting happening right now, and a lot of it would benefit from seeing painting as a kind of public discourse on aesthetics.

Ostrowski: Do you think it’s bad painting or that there’s more painting? I assume it’s the same world for painting as twenty years ago, but the access has changed and it has become more confusing. It is harder to find the discourse that is personally interesting for you.

Rail: I just think American culture is becoming very literal. Our country is a country of story-telling, and I think we are projecting the expectations of narrative into what has been the space of aesthetics. I also think that it’s advertising influencing culture, marketing and self-promotion becoming so aligned with experience that it isn’t perceptible. I feel like artists are focusing on how to pitch themselves and by extension, the work. I recently had a young gallery director tell me that if an artist couldn't explain their work to her in two minutes, she was no longer interested. Which feels different than the painting you’re doing, where all of the energy is stored in the painting and there’s no remainder left for language–only utterance, or the sputter of the mark.

But you’re working through sequences, almost like an anthology filmmaker. I’m wondering if you consider yourself to be a part of the idea of performance painting. Marie de Brugerolle talks about it, that painters now are distanced from the original ideas of painting and now perform what a painter should be in different ways. Or Cory Arcangel said Michel Majerus was a performance artist who painted; and then when he was asked what he meant by that, he said that Majerus was thinking of where the painting would go and how it would circulate, both as an image but also physically: within or without institutional spaces? would they end up in storage or on a wall? how is it shared as a jpeg? And all of that is part of the process of making the painting. Part of me feels like there’s potential affinity there with what you’re doing, but I could just as easily see that that’s not at all what you're doing. You're putting the excessive energy into it, and everything else is not of interest.

Ostrowski: I am interested in painting and what painting can do; I am not a performance artist. When I paint, I put all my energy into the work and then let go. Once I’ve let go, they are free. However, I am very precise in the image editing of individual pictures as well as exhibition installations. My thinking also extends to publications. Catalogs are an important part of my work.

Rail: Someone was telling me that Jasper Johns would drop off all of his work for Castelli and then show up at the opening. His idea was that if the work is good it doesn’t matter where you hang it, and there was a trust there that Castelli’s job was to contextualize it, not him. I think there are a lot of reasons that artists have taken on so many responsibilities that used to be the work of curators and dealers, to be the “total-service artist” as Raphael Rubinstein would say. And it’s become this nervous accommodation of everything—systems, transitive painting, networks, that we are now responsible for building our own context. I think there's a way that I could look at these paintings and think that because of your pastiche, that implies that you are involved in the circulation of them. The answer is the exact opposite, that you make these paintings and once they're up on the wall, that's it. And you aren’t interested in trying to form how they are being perceived.

Ostrowski: I believe that a work can reach the recipients who are interested in it. But when it comes to dissemination, I want to have as little influence as possible. I’m also not active on social media and avoid openings and other art events. Honestly, I've been hanging out at playgrounds or soccer fields with my son for years. But I do look at things on different channels that speak to me. And these days I hang a lot with my students.

Rail: Are there any exhibitions that shaped you as an artist or that you just got really excited about?

Ostrowski: Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich’s German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain.

Rail: Are you a Modernist? A formalist?

Ostrowski: An illusionist.

Rail: Are there things that you are resisting or going against? Or are there things that you think painting is still capable of doing or makes it relevant? I feel like, for one, you are cautious of sentimental ideas. In the press release you talk about wanting to dismantle the owl in its symbolic meaning, its function as allegory as either good or evil? Are there any other acts of resisting? Or things that you are disinterested in with your painting?

Ostrowski: There’s too much painting out there that says nothing to me. Still, painting in general nowadays is totally underrated. In my painting, I avoid having too many drips running down the canvas. The eighties are over! Most of my work groups are melancholic. There's a certain anti-attitude present in the “F” series as well. Misery has a positive connotation for me. I named an entire group of works “Dann lieber nein.” But I try to make the best out of a depressive situation. Bei mir geht es in den Keller hoch—“for me—I go up through the basement to get upstairs.”

Rail: Yeah, right. Yeah. I mean, going back to humor, it feels adjacent to the ways comedians talk about working on their routine. It's like doing a show to try out the joke, see if it catches. If it doesn't, then you cut it.

Ostrowski: I try to handle most things in life with humor. Humor is existential in my family, and it was an important part of my upbringing. It’s kind of a survival mode. For example, my grandmother, who survived Auschwitz, was a writer and satirist. I don’t handle most things in life with routine. My different work groups help me avoid falling into a routine. As soon as I get bored, I simply switch series or start a completely new idea. I sit in the studio almost every day and spend most of the time not working physically. Most of it happens in my head. And eventually, I get going. For the past twenty years, it's always been the same vertical format, just scaled up or down. In recent years, there have also been some horizontal accidents. When I get into work mode, I think: I should do this painting thing more often. There is so much to discuss on the canvas surface and with the materials. This is what I'm into. I am most excited about it. And there might be a misunderstanding about my works in the past. People thought it was the end of painting. To me, it feels like the start of something. I'm already thinking of making new works. I have no idea what it will be, but I’m looking forward to it.

Rail: I’m realizing how much it seems you’ve been misunderstood, or how your work has been contextualized in ways that don’t really grasp what you’re doing. Sometimes your work has been lumped into Neo-Modernism, but that’s really reductive. For one thing, there’s the melancholy, and the understanding that nothing isn’t nothing, that nothing produces form and meaning. But also, you’re addressing painting as a corpus—these deep runs that see a work group’s ideas through over the course of decades. I feel like you’ve often been fundamentally mischaracterized. I know definitions and labels are always pretty unwelcome, but are you more of an anti-aesthetic painter? I could see you as having more of a relationship with Picabia or someone who refuses style than however one would define neo-modernism.

Ostrowski: I don't want to be categorized, and personally, I don't care for subcultures, scenes or cliques. I don't feel like I belong to anything specific.

Rail: How often are you thinking of new work? You said you’re feeling ready for a new work group.

Ostrowski: I’m constantly thinking about new work.

Rail: Your subjects are enigmatic without being random, and they’re never obvious. As a viewer you have a feeling that there’s a specific reason that isn’t being disclosed. Sometimes it’s clever, sometimes it’s just what will make a good painting, but whatever it is it feels like an undisclosed-specific that you carefully arrived at. It’s a kind of open-ended subject. Are you thinking the new work group will be a formal decision or be more conceptual?

Ostrowski: When you approach painting as intuitively as I try to, you never really know what will come out of it. I go with the flow. For example with the paintings of hangers, I saw a hanger left in my studio by my wife, and I thought that something could come out of this motif. And then I work on this seemingly trivial motif for a while. I do more thinking and analyzing during the painting process. It's like turning a small sketch into a bigger story.

Rail: So it’s relational? Like poetry and philosophy, it's like trying to be aware of the affect as it passes through, like that blur in Early American Painting (Parliament Paintings), that glides across the crazing of the parliament underneath. The blur over the history of painting.

Ostrowski: Yes, it is definitely related. In a way, I am both a dramatist and a satirist. What comes out in the end for me is a melody.

Rail: I think what makes painting vital is as Derrida said there is always a surplus of meaning. And in your case, the surplus bleeds out, and it comes at the cost of the language for it.

Ostrowski: You have articulated what I try to paint.

Rail: Is it an interest in taking signs and seeing if they can be entered into the realm of the symbolic?

Ostrowski: It can be a symbol, but it can also be a mark painted by a construction worker.