Andreas Grimm and Adrian Rosenfeld are pleased to announce a new exhibition of paintings and drawings by German artist Cornelius Völker.

The artist’s new “Trash” paintings employ monochromatic fields as backdrops for clumps of refuse, melted candy, crumpled wrappers and yogurt cups painted so heavily, the physicality of the paint itself renders the subjects nearly moot. These large pictures are juxtaposed against canvases of sad men in slouchy trousers, flabby creases of middle age ponch described in corpulent globs of paint. The complex ideals of the ordinary alongside the always polemic “point” of painting at all, are at work in these new pictures.

Völker’s work is dominated by color in raw and physical states. Thick layers render the visceral nature of the images and smeared gradients pit abstraction against the figurative in a satisfying reversal of fortune for the subject – a thick layer of paint suddenly turns into an oyster and fast strokes become pleats on pants.

With his ability to attract, not just with subject matter, but also with his return to a more traditional technique, Völker presents a duality of meaning in his images: as credible representatives of themselves while also being the subject of an abstract process.

Völker sees his work as a challenge to how much “the art of painting” can take. In the case of a canvas presenting pure trash – the subjects stripped down to their essence while remaining externalized and abstract Völker’s work is not a return to banality. It is a surrender to the fact that there is a gap between the painted object, its artistic adoption, and the knowledge that painting can only generate paintings.

Cornelius Völker lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.