Ull Hohn
Tan Enamel
1993
Lacquer and modeling paste on canvas
59.8 x 60.2 x 1.6 in (152 x 153 x 4 cm)
Image courtesy Galerie Neu
Ull Hohn (Trier, 1960-Berlin, 1995) was a student of Gerhard Richter’s before moving to New York in 1986 to attend the Whitney Independent Study Program, which encouraged its students to insert themselves “as a sexual and class-conditioned subject into the picture.” The tan enamel series, of which this work is an example, is more explicitly related to homosexuality and AIDS / Hohn’s own diagnosis than his Bob Ross paintings.
Yet there is a clear connection between Hohn’s Bob Ross series and the Tan Enamel series: “It is via the question of the production of identity through culturally, politically and ideologically determined representations of “nature” or “the natural” that a connection can be made between Hohn’s landscapes and the monochromes. On the other hand, it becomes evident here that Hohn’s engagement with abstraction also aims to articulate a homosexual subject position.” (Foregrounds, Distances ,p. 17)
The tan monochrome surface, constructed out of non-“high art”, DIY construction materials such as enamel and modeling paste, and bearing traces of Hohn’s own fingers, grounds modernist or “fine art” painting into real life and into “skin as the site of evidence in terms of disease.” (Lanka Tattersall in Foregrounds, Distances, p. 147)
In the text accompanying Hohn’s exhibition of paintings at American Fine Arts, Co., in New York in 1993, he wrote, “There are no great mysteries to painting. You only need the desire to paint, a few basic techniques and little practice.” He displayed two tan enamel works with other series from “amateur-painting” (the Bob Ross series), “student painting” and “unfinished/ornamental abstraction, describing the tan enamel series as:
“Tan Enamel”
(a great painting)
simulates the requirements of modernist painting. It shows flatness, all-overness and objecthood all at once. A relief of the messy and uncoordinated traces of my hands is underlying the sanitizing and unifying cover of enamel paint.”
Foregrounds, Distances, p. 153
This idea of the monochrome surface having a “sanitizing” function “can also be related to the stigmatization of homosexuality as something dangerous to society, which was a common idea in the culture wars of the late 1980s.” (Magnus Schaefer in Foregrounds, Distances, p. 146).
Hohn also included lengthy quotations from John Boswell’s 1980 book “Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality” dealing with categorizations of “natural” and the “unnatural” to accompany the Tan Enamel series (see Foregrounds, Distances, p. 17-19; 30-31, 110).
Hohn was not prolific and his life cut short. In 1989-90, Hohn produced about three precursors to the tan enamel paintings using plexiglass and wood supports and from 1990 through 1994 produced one 10-part tan enamel work (collection Museum Ludwig, Cologne), a large diptych, and 6 tan enamel paintings of which this work is an example. In 1991, Hohn produced a related series of three paintings of modeling paste on the “backs” of small 18-inch square canvases and stretcher bars.
Provenance
Private Collection, Germany
Galerie Neu
See also
Ull Hohn at Kunsthalle Bern, April 25 – June 5, 2016
Ull Hohn in the collection of the Walker Art Center
“Ull Hohn: Foregrounds, Distances,” MD 72, Berlin, 27 February – 5 March, 2016
“Ull Hohn painting, painting with frame by Tom Burr,” Peephole, Milan, June 6, 2015
“Ull Hohn,” Galerie Neu, Berlin, 1 December 2010 – 1 January 2011
“Ull Hohn,” Algus Greenspon, New York, 13 November – 18 December 2010
“Ull Hohn: Off the Wall,” Galerie Neu, Berlin, 20 March – 22 April 2006
David Rimanelli, “Ull Hohn at American Fine Arts,” Arforum, March 1994