Neue Frisuren für die Ewigkeit

Haunted by Ghosts One has become used to reading about how art can change the world; how by visualising the unimaginable and the new, art can be productive of perspective and can influence and astound us. Inscribed in this reading is the expectation that the world would then look different, somehow corrected by a conception of art which should, if nothing else, sustain the idea that change is possible. Just as Ronald Kodritsch was turning to art and deciding to become an artist himself, precisely this concept of art was in a period of crisis characterised by a post-modern scepticism over the tenability of the claim that the world could be changed through progress and art. In this sense disparity supplies the coordinates of the cultural context out of and in which Ronald Kodritsch’s artistic practice arose. Considering the wide spectrum of genres and media associated with the artist, it always seems to be painting that represents his essential profession most accurately. Precisely painting, a discipline that has been written off time and again in the face of relentless demands for novelty, offered the paradoxical possibility of holding onto a supposedly obsolete genre, perhaps even retaining the idea of a good picture or good painting. A wewing, through the history of abstraction and Abstract Expressionism, past Kippenberger & Co and into the present.