Excerpt from the text: “Gerken´s Garden“ by Gregor Jansen (2022)
Shuttling or dancing back and forth between form and surface, Ina Gerken is developing an indissoluble body of work that is surprising and unique in its artistic nonconformity. Emerging amid the gestural scribbles and layerings are streaks, tangles, grids, structures, patterns, waves, clouds, stripes, fans, and much more besides, whose consistency and contingency are virtually impossible to describe in words. Rather, her painting displays an infinite visual concision, whose formlessness of colorful forms is only very inadequately described by the quality of abstract ornamental tangles of lines. Natural chaos or chaotic nature in all its inimitable beauty, a glimpse into the essence of things and world with no clear up or down. We are tempted to believe that surreal beings whose forms we can only guess at but never name inhabit Gerken’s highly suggestive and strangely organic-looking visual worlds, worlds that at the same time cast sidelong looks at an American-looking and—if the allusion is not too bold—female abstract expressionism. (…)
(…) At work is a kind of geology of the gaze—mountains, sediments, leaves, ferns—that comes to light again and again and always in new ways, in the same way that the sound of a Don Glen Van Vliet, under the pseudonym Captain Beefheart, expands the palette/keyboard of techniques and styles with his experimental rock music mingling blues, avant-garde jazz, country, fusion, Sprechgesang, punk, acid rock, and rockabilly. In this triad with Ina Gerken, a general recognition of the infinite potential of image and music is miraculously set resonating with many, in the best sense, thoughtful (joyful, sometimes melancholy) vibrations, dense movements that she executes and balances out around the image, which move us inwardly and motivate us as well. Image and sound unfold in endless timbres within the incomprehensible universe of abstraction. Her paintings invite us to contemplate the outside and inside, to look upon painting and world, and that makes us quiet. Pure sense perception in the ethereal earthly realm. Nevertheless, I recommend looking loudly, intensely, and long—and live, of course, blissful in Gerken’s garden.
Excerpt from the text: “Wondrous World of Seeing” by Vera Lutter (2020)
(…) “To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees,” is an aphorism attributed to Paul Valéry. This is equally true for the artist in creation as for the viewer in perception. We feel that we know when something is right, an intangible certainty. We make a visual assessment that precedes logic and formal evaluation. The painter maintains a similar awareness, knowing when to continue the process of painting and when to stop, where to struggle and where to relent. She can define through her creative process when something is incomplete and when it is finished.
Of course, the viewer’s aesthetic realization and the artist’s intuitive creation are not the sole factors at play in the act of seeing. When rationality sets in, an undercurrent of dialectics begins to develop in the mind and a dialogue emerges between instinct and reason. In the creative process, an artist experiences two inherently symbiotic forms of seeing: organic perception and rational cognition. They oscillate constantly as the artist and viewer participate in creative evaluation.
The artist moves through a choreography of gut perception and pointed aesthetic choices. An abstract painter manifests emotion through relationships of shape, color and form, and continually adjusts their balance. Innate manifestations in the form of brushstrokes are punctuated with aesthetic decisions made in the name of achieving formal balance.
The process of painting is an interplay of seeing, doing and thinking- a constantly evolving cycle of controlled response to intuition. In the delicacy of this continuous exchange of organic and logical observation lies the chance for successful artmaking and consequently, its examination.
For the viewer these two methods of observation must be taken into account in order to progress from absorbing a work to articulating a reaction. We maintain our immediate response and take a step back, asking ourselves what elements we comprehend about an artwork, and why?
Ina Gerken’s paintings are beautiful; they are arresting at first sight. Shapes, forms and lines follow an inner logic and fall into a generous rhythm with one another. The paintings are earnest while yet without stiff formality. They are impressive without being overbearing, determining a clear space in which my eyes and mind can move. Nothing remains fragmented or hastily cared for. While many of Ina Gerken’s works are impressive in size, densely covered with forceful brush strokes in intense colors, they maintain an acute delicacy. (…)