Josephine Adu – Prizewinner Exhibition Wolfgang Blanke Foundation

Dear Josephine, Dear Mr. Blanke, Dear people present,

I am delighted to be able to speak today about the work of Josephine Adu, to whom the jury unanimously awarded the Wolfgang Blanke Prize for Painting.

It was immediately obvious to us that this is a genuinely painterly approach and, in particular, an impressively developed colouristic position.

On the path on which I have been able to accompany Josephine Adu on her artistic journey so far, she initially placed a much stronger emphasis on the material of the painting. Instead of classic oil paint, she experimented with wax, sand, pigments and a wide variety of painting materials. Gesture, but also the inherent laws of the material, its flow, its chunkiness, its lustre or dullness were emphasized in the process. The resulting colours were mostly monochrome or earthy chiaroscuro.

In the course of time, these rather reserved, shy colours developed into more vital, richer tones, which eventually became the extraordinary colouring we are looking at today.

I would like to take a fragmentary look at the similarities and differences under the following headings: Surface / Body / Colour / Thought / Play.

Throughout, Josephine Adu obviously focusses on the surfaces and the exploration of the material, which she helps to accentuate with extraordinary sensitivity. This can also be seen in the fact that she very often produces her colours herself.

The surface of a painting will always be richer and more ambiguous than a photographic or digital reproduction. In its materiality, it communicates itself to our awareness of our body and our nervous system in a much more complex and forceful way. Which is why looking at a painted picture does not only appeal to the intellect, but is a physical experience.

Merleau-Ponty puts it this way: 'I feel not only visually, but also physically.'

To return from physical sensation to the surface: the surface was at the forefront of the early, wild and rugged compositions. This desire to see what happens when you stir something together (which most painters probably share) has been transformed into a subtle interplay of surfaces and gestures that - placed next to each other on the picture surface - are pushed into each other, superimposed and combined in further and further variations.

So what we see here today are rather calm, almost soft, sometimes luxuriously luminous surfaces made of the thinnest layers of acrylic and watercolour paint. Transparent veils seem to partially sink into the canvas (making it look like coloured fabric). In addition, several layers overlap to form a stable compactness, only to become foggy swathes again. There are applications of colour that are so homogeneous that one wonders whether they have been screen-printed. Then there are clouds of colour and elegant brushstrokes, even border-like serpentine movements on and next to monumental-looking blocks of colour, which are pressed against by strips of paint that push their way into the picture from the edge like soffits.

The question that concerns me most in view of Josi's pictures is: What do they actually represent?

It is clear that they are not illustrations. Although one could develop associations such as pattern sheets, weather phenomena or stage architecture, this does not correspond to the artist's intention.

Nor are they surrogates of memories or emotional situations, as the painter Howard Hodgkin, for example, condensed in colour.

This is probably the old game that Jasper Johns once described as follows: "Colour A over colour B. It's all been there before. Nothing new."

Colour A over colour B is really an ancient idea. But that's probably why it's so relevant.

However, the result at the end of Josephine Adu's painting process is something new.

In my opinion, this something, special and unique, lies in the aforementioned great sensitivity with which Josephine Adu shapes the body of colour and its complex interactions:

• In the oscillation between sensuality and brittleness – and fluidity that simultaneously radiates dryness.
• And whose paint surfaces exert an attraction through subtlety and luminosity that can only be generated by those who 'have the colour'.
• Also in the astonishing organisation of the pictorial space, in which no colour form is constantly dominant, in which colour climates are never just cold or warm. Each colour is given exactly the space it needs.

Josephine Adu's paintings create or form a space that – depending on which element you look at – changes its tonality and its 'character'. One senses a shifting, a wavering, sometimes a pulsating – and this is possible above all because there is a deep, serious engagement with colour here. And with its complexity.

Colour, which in the current art scene is often regarded as less than intellectual, as superficial cosmetics, as sentimental, vulgar and commercial. Colour is 'French shit'.

None of this is the case with Josi Adu. Instead, what Goethe said applies here: "Colours are deeds of light, yes, deeds and sufferings of light."

For me, Josephine Adu's works (and her exploration of the deeds of light) are like batteries or energy fields that you can recharge yourself with, whose sounds you can absorb, in which you feel both major and minor and feel hot and cold - just as the painter herself probably did when she played this game called painting.

This 'immersing oneself exclusively in colour', without recourse to anything linguistically comprehensible, can be seen as a mental space in which we understand something through the complex interactions of colour. For example, about fear or desire or power. By recognising something more directly and, above all, differently than we do through language.

Cézanne said: "Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet."

Just as the painting process can also be seen as a game. Incidentally, Le Corbusier said it was "the most difficult game."

It is very gratifying that people nevertheless take on this challenge, which is not easy.

And devote themselves to this game with pleasure, love and skill.

Just like Josi Adu. I hope she plays for a long time to come!