“Painting ist the Message”
Elisabeth Plank – Development and Reception
Gabriele Spindler
Elisabeth Plank (b. 1960) chose the work Großes Bild mit Lila (Large Painting with Purple) as the opener of her 2015 monograph, a publication bearing the same name. It is one of the artist’s earliest paintings, yet it proved to be paradigmatic for oncoming developments in Elisabeth Plank’s oeuvre and artistic principles. The composition features distinct fields of color that are formally reminiscent of collaged paper cuttings but are, in fact, acrylic paint on canvas. The title alludes to no external reality, only to the intrinsic components of the painting: the picture itself, more specifically, the image carrier or object, its format, and the color – in this case purple, just one of the many colors applied. The arrangement of these different color fields emphasizes the relationships between them, which ones come to the fore, which remain in the background. All in all, it is already clear that the artist set out to pursue nothing less than the underlying questions and conditions of painting.
The painting originates in Vienna at a time when the medium was enjoying a renaissance. “Painting is back” was the motto at the Museum moderner Kunst in 1983, where the exhibition Einfach gute Malerei (Simply Good Painting) was on show, featuring the work of ten contemporary Austrian artists of the younger generation. In 1986 followed the exhibition Hacken im Eis (Hacking in the Ice) at the same venue with five young painters from Austria. In this era, both exhibitions played a key role for the development and reception of the “Neue Wilde” movement, the Austrian variant of an international revival of painting that included both expressive-figurative and abstract manifestations. Having said that, both exhibitions presented exclusively male artistic positions.
Elisabeth Plank, in turn, was invited to the 1986 exhibition Junge Szene Wien (Young Scene Vienna). This show had a broader scope in terms of media and artistic approaches, emphasizing a “juxtaposition of forms of expression” while embracing the “geometric” too. What’s more, female artists were invited – albeit for only four of the 24 positions. Then, in 1989, Plank participated in the exhibition 60 Tage österreichisches Museum des 21. Jahrhunderts (60 Days Austrian Museum of the 21st Century), which aimed to present “a very pluralistic overview of the young Austrian art scene”.
In the 1980s, Elisabeth Plank’s work oscillated between a dominating abstraction and figurative references, which, however, are only apparent in the titles of the paintings. Nevertheless, it is clear from beginning of her career that narrative contents take a back seat to formal and compositional aspects in the creative process. Towards the end of the 1980s, the airbrush found its way into Plank’s palette, a development that would have a decisive impact on her pictorial world – especially in combination with the stencil technique – up to the early 1990s. Subtle compositions with floating objects and figures only tangible in their outlines lent the paintings a unique lightness but also a metaphorical and lyrical quality.
By 1990/91, word-image constellations in photographs and screen prints make a surprising appearance in Plank’s oeuvre. At a presentation in the Wittgenstein Haus, superimposed black-and-white self-portraits combine with very personal, poetic text fragments, while in the exhibition Der Ort in Wort – named after a print graphic – in the Galerie der Stadt Wels, she layered blurred screen prints of ads from daily newspapers with playful neologisms, a gesture that cites the tradition of visual poetry.
In this phase, Elisabeth Plank received two residency scholarships abroad, leading to a five-month stay in New York in 1991. A letter of recommendation from her professor Oswald Oberhuber, whom she studied under at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and remained closely acquainted with throughout her life, opened the doors for an exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum, together with her two fellow artists Edgar Honetschläger and Josef Ramaseder. In 1992, the artist spent nine months in Tokyo, where she took part in a workshop with the painter Kenjiro Okazaki, whose abstract, impasto, and sublimely color-intensive painting techniques made a lasting impression. Also the tradition of Japanese ink painting and calligraphy left its traces, expressed above all in a formal reduction to simple signs and markings. For example, in the extensive series Symmetry and Symmetry, Plank experimented with black ink on folded rice paper. Drops pervade the fine paper to produce a myriad of symmetrical image formations. However, the Colour Codes series, pictures consisting solely of serial rows of paint strokes, must be mentioned in this context too. In works like Pond or Japanese Landscape, this stringency dissolves – while retaining the reduced formal vocabulary of strokes and dots – in favor of a return to more pictorial compositions. At the same time, the titles allude to landscape impressions and thus figurative connotations.
In the Zeitcontainer series, works with sepia on molino, the Japanese influences are still evident. These paintings are composed entirely of dots, although the variation and concentration of the applied ink and the different nuances in the sepia tone generate almost animate, three-dimensional pictorial compositions that conjure organic forms and patterns.
Around the mid-1990s, Elisabeth Plank’s painting once again took a step in a distinctly different direction: broad, sweeping brushstrokes, color flowing in rivulets across the canvas, and scattered splashes of paint culminate in a new painterly dynamic. Additionally, many works from this phase exhibit a sophisticated approach to overlapping layers – sometimes planar, sometimes more voluminous – whose interplay defines the overall impression.
In 1996, Elisabeth Plank and fellow artist Franz Graf curated the exhibition (Antarctica) Brahma at the Galerie nächst St. Stephan, which was accompanied by an eponymous artist’s book with a lyrical text written by Plank herself. They invited a number of Icelandic and Austrian artists to this group exhibition, including Elke Krystufek and Gisela Stigler. In this year, she was also invited to take part in the exhibition Elements. Austrian Painting since 1980, curated by Georg Eisler and Kristian Sotriffer, which traveled to Dublin and later Merano.
From the mid-2000s onwards, Plank turned to more dense, complex, and gesturally expressive compositions. Paint splatters, airbrush clouds, and colors pouring out over the picture plane in broad swathes or fine rivulets yield abstract and multilayered image structures. At the same time, the painting formats became larger and larger; two to three-meter-wide canvases were not uncommon. In the meanwhile, the artist had relocated to Linz, where she once again found a spacious studio to continue working. A sovereign creative process resonates in these numerous large-format works, a category Elisabeth Plank masters effortlessly. They evolve directly on the canvas without any preliminary sketches. She abandons herself to the act of painting, confiding in her own practice, for “in painting, thinking is painting,” as Gerhard Richter so poignantly formulated.
A few years later, however, Plank would again return to more reduced formal settings, for example the multi-part series on paper Vertical, diagonal or Code. These paintings feature accumulations of stripes, primarily in vertical and occasionally diagonal arrangements, applied with idiosyncratic combinations of airbrush and acrylic painting that achieve unusual visual effects. Stripes also appear in numerous large-format paintings with primarily planar structures, which at times unfold into three-dimensionality. The horizontal or vertical layout of several stripes of the same length and color create the impression of stacked color – not by chance, Color Piles is also the title of a series from this time.
The following work phase comprised numerous cycles of paintings abounding with amorphous forms. In series such as Online Compositions, Paintbabies, or Shapes, these forms emerge from a black background and spiral out from the center of the picture to the very edges of the canvas. In 2019, Elisabeth Plank had the opportunity to present works from the Shapes series in a solo exhibition at the Museumspavillon in Salzburg’s Mirabell Garden. In the same year, she was invited to participate in the exhibition Discrete Austrian Secrets curated by Margareta Sandhofer, a presentation of Austrian contemporary art featuring 32 contributing artists in the Chinese metropolis of Chongqing.
In Elisabeth Plank’s latest series of works, titled Ponds and Lyrics, the striped forms return, albeit in a considerably freer style than before. The combination of egg-shaped elements, the colorful background, and naturally the title of the Ponds series conjures associations with landscapes and, more specifically, reflections in the water. The title of the most recent series, Lyrics, which lends its name to the current exhibition, does not refer explicitly to song texts, rather it points to the characteristic lyrical undertone at play in Elisabeth Plank’s creations.
The recurring fluctuations in the artist’s oeuvre between gestural-expressive and minimalist phases, between formally strict and subtle, more poetic settings, between references to the figurative world and thoroughly abstract painterly formulations testify to Elisabeth Plank’srelentless quest within the potentials that painting affords. The principle of permanent change in art that her teacher and friend Oswald Oberhuber advocated seems to guide her way: “Art is not continuity, but rather INSTANTANEOUS invention.” Another “playful companion” of Elisabeth Plank is none other than painting itself, which the artist feels akin to in a kind of metaphorical personalization: “Thanks to my playmate, painting, which always reveals very little, but has never lost interest in me.”