Smear and Clean

In the organizer's words:

In the solo exhibition Smear and Clean at Kunsthaus Essen, the painter Sibylle Czichon presents her work for the first time across three exhibition rooms and provides an insight into new works. The focus: contemporary abstract painting.

During her time around and after graduating from the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 2019, Sibylle Czichon focused on gestural movements and the materiality of the picture support in her painting. She removed the fabric from the stretcher frame and stapled it to walls, laid the canvas on the floor to work on it, leaving a trace on the canvas with her own body, and used a lot of red and black paint. This phase is a central building block for her further preoccupation with abstract painting - in contrast to and in harmony with her beginnings, in the awareness that art history has long created a male-dominated terrain out of it and prefers serial productions as an art market strategy as well as the search for a language that does not mean the word.

In her works, Sibylle Czichon works through the rules, i.e. the precepts and commandments of painting, and repeatedly formulates a new claim to the medium of painting and abstraction for herself. Intuition as well as control can be seen in her paintings - there are conscious settings that reveal the image conceived in advance and intuition that appears like distortions of controlled settings.

Her current work focuses on the representability and experience of acute presence in abstract painting: textures and patterns can be seen that develop from rhythmic movement sequences, ciphers and ornaments. To this end, she uses printing processes to transfer imprints of traces of painting onto the canvas and creates several layers that interweave to form pictorial structures with different temporalities. She uses tools such as adhesive tape, sponges and stencils from cleaning utensils to produce her images. She works on several works in parallel, whereby the works influence each other and generate suggestions for further pictures. The tools and techniques thus become infinite variables and an inexhaustible repertoire.

In keeping with the exhibition title, the artist Sibylle Czichon's new cycle of works Smear and Clean is dedicated to abstract painting and the materials used for it: cleaning utensils. On display are 13 works - pastel matt and shiny silver, between chance and order.

The exhibition is sponsored by the Cultural Office of the City of Essen.

The artist is currently funded by the Kunststiftung NRW.

The project is curated by Katharina Bruns.

Free admission

Opening hours: Mon 5 - 8 pm, Fri to Sun 3 - 6 pm