How a particular tradition of German abstraction mucked-in with the countercultural and the cool
Partly a reconstruction of a show the German painter staged as a student during the mid-1990s, Guido Münch’s REVIVAL is a portrait of the artist as a young consumer. In München/Rom/Dublin (1997), variations on the same basic pattern are repeated across three canvases. The iconic triple stripes of Adidas trainers are reduced to flat planes of colour: thick, saw-toothed bands of blue, orange and maroon. Hung in a series one above the other, the paintings resemble academic colour studies, or options on an online retailer: colourways for you to choose from.
Münch sees himself as working within a tradition of German abstraction – Blinky Palermo is namechecked in the handout, and Josef Albers is a distant touchstone – albeit an abstraction that has been contaminated by advertising and popular culture. Unlike his later output, which draws on the slick design language of faceless corporations such as Mastercard and Bluetooth, the paintings on show here pull from the countercultural and the cool.
Leaning lengthways against the wall with an arranged indifference are painted replicas of five band logos. Godflesh and Unsane (both 1995) reproduce the chucky sans-serif typefaces favoured by hardcore and industrial bands post-Minor Threat. Imposing in black, red and white, the blocks of colour reveal gestural brushstrokes up close; there’s a shakiness to the sharp edges. Clutch (1995) precisely lifts the logo from the eponymous hard rock band’s 1992 EP, Passive Restraints, right down to the ironic trademark symbol in the top corner. That diminutive TM was dropped from Clutch’s record covers by the time their debut album was released in 1993, perhaps reflecting the discomfort in the air around the corporatisation of alternative music. From a 30-year distance, that tension is most apparent in Nirvana (1995). Interpolating the blood-red lettering and sickly yellow background of their 1993 album In Utero, it was painted the year after Kurt Cobain was found dead in his Seattle home. When these logo works were first shown, at the Kunstakademie Karlsruhe in 1995, the exhibition was called Big Sell Out Bastard. Now presented as revival, the title mockingly suggests that nostalgia absolves past transgressions against integrity, flattening troubling histories, especially as the youth culture of the 90s is exhumed and repackaged for a new generation.
Although he has exhibited in London and Plymouth as part of the collective Konsortium, this is Münch’s first solo show in the UK. Digging up old student work seems like a strange choice for first introductions, but it is indicative of the overarching project that has sustained the artist for his entire career: cataloguing a life of consumption and processing those impressions through the language of reductive abstraction. Lining the back wall of the gallery, a vitrine displays a range of personal artefacts: an Unsane T-shirt, tattered Adidas trainers, Johannes Meinhardt’s 1997 book, Ende der Malerei und Malerei nach dem Ende der Malerei (The End of Painting and Painting After the End of Painting), a ticket for The Matrix (1999). An ossified archive or anarchic shrine? Above, two black-and-white canvases, Untitled (1995), contain only the words ‘Guido Münch – Ölfarbe auf Leinwand’ (oil on linen): painting as impersonal autobiography, an index of once-resonant symbols and documents from an era revived within an inch of its life.
REVIVAL at Ivory Tars, Glasgow, 18 January – 23 February
From the March 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
