George Pusenkoff

Pusenkoff’s theme is the “career” of abstract art, starting with its birth in the early 20th century, through its countless metamorphoses and upheavals, to the digital present. Most of the works presented here by the Belarusian artist, now based in Cologne, are inspired by the colourful world of images of the Internet and refer to the incunabula of American painting, to Action Painting and Colour Field Painting, to Jackson Pollock, Sam Francis, Mark Rothko. Pusenkoff does not simply copy their work but instead translates it into a new aesthetic, informed by the technology of the new digital media. The edges of his paintings often feature task and scroll bars, cursor arrows and icons borrowed from the user interface of electronic image processing programmes. This unsettling dissolving of very traditional painted images opens up new horizons of interpretation and previously separate levels of perception now overlap.