Frank Nitsche: Ultravisitor

Frank Nitsche was born in 1964 in Görlitz, formerly GDR, and was a student at the Dresden Academy at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He has been living and working in the German capital for the past 6 years. After a first exhibition at the gallery in 2002, he returns with a series of recent paintings and the publication of a book covering his 10 years of work.

Nitsche favors a palette alternating acid and pastel colors. His geometric abstractions, whose origins are to be found in the constructivist period of abstract painting, present an angular, flat and polished appearance, but a closer examination reveals a dynamic surface of drips, stains and pasty strokes more akin to the American abstraction of a Stella and Peter Halley for example. Futuristic forms appear regularly in his compositions and evoke the artist's passion for speed and industrial design.

In Nitsche's recent paintings, angles and surfaces collide and contours intersect, creating the illusion of fantastic depth, which, more than ever, seems to be fed by architectural sources. Thick surfaces in orange-red, purple, violet and gray tones are streaked with dozens of interlocking lines, producing an optical effect similar to the vibrations of a computer graphic. The source of these paintings is an extensive image bank that the artist has diligently collected in binders for years. Nitsche's distorting layering of alternating perspectives creates both an illusion of depth and a tension between abstraction and representation

Frank Nitsche's work is a highly original pictorial position within the new German scene that is more attracted to the figure and the narrative. Also, it finds a privileged place on a more universal level on what it means today to be a contemporary painter with an abstract language.

Frank Nitsche has been exhibiting regularly in his galleries in Germany since 1994 and in the United States. He is present in many public collections such as the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern in London and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions such as at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2005 and at the Museum of Leverkusen in 2003.