Jost Münster

New Paintings

Brought up in the region of Stuttgart and Ulm, centers of ‘contemporary’ industrial design, Műnster was aware of the seductive implications of fine surface and the mix of aerodynamic form and function as it integrated into experience of everyday life. The commercial and ideological appeal of commercially globalized style was regarded with suspicion in German contemporary painting, for example the ambivalence about the seductions of American Pop Art in work by Palermo and Richter, and the mythic gestural invocations of Penck, Kiefer, Beuys and Polke. For Munster this tension was itself a rich resource which painting could explore.

From the technological point of view, Münster enjoys a seductive potential in the investigation of tactile structures and the invention of useful forms. However, these could appear against disparate backgrounds, their perfectibility subject to decay and de-formation, unexpectedly displaced in use or accidental interventions found in daily life. An example could be the ‘hippy’ practice of re-decorating VW’s hi-tech spray-paint with brushed-on house paint. These contrasts offered playful possibilities: the power of the trademarked sign with the disruptive interventions of individually personalized preferences. This has been explored by Münster in many documentary photographs that informing practice at the level of seeking out interesting contrasts and rehearsing their meanings through a wide research of their distinctions and compatibilities.

Engagement with the experience of visual disparity brings unexpected and unconventional conjunctions to painting that have a classical modernist basis in experimental colour and textural interactions but extend to philosophical engagements with process, fabrication, materiality, and placement of the ‘construction’ of painting equally in practice and in installation. Munster adopts painting’s appeal to the imagination and illusion as a mobile proposition. For instance, the form of a painted shelf, in which the question of which is the image arises: the support or the thing, also a painting, placed upon it. Ordering, scale and sequence become questions of difference and repetition which, in turn, become interest in distinction. At this point the propositions of Munster’s work become seriously weighted, considered yet playfully open to further investigation.

The elements of illusion that result from constructive practice are subtly judged, inviting speculation about levels and progressions. Opticality weighs gravity, sensations of translucency and density, gestural diversions, pleasure in colours, their interactions and their codes, slight shifts in depths of surface that create shadow, or the introduction of painterly graduations that also create illusions of depth or precedence. Above all, the paintings allow a surprising optical eventfulness to become apparent.

Joan Key, London 2026

Wolfgang Flad

Between Erosion and Emergence

Wolfgang Flad’s artistic practice explores the fluid boundaries between sculpture, relief and painting, drawing inspiration from the structures, rhythms and transformative processes of the natural world. Organic growth, erosion and geological stratification inform a visual language in which matter appears to evolve according to its own internal logic. His works evoke forms found in nature, from microscopic organisms and porous cellular structures to lunar landscapes and weathered rock formations, while remaining open to individual interpretation.

The sculptures, including works from the Xylem series, embody this dialogue between natural processes and artistic construction. Their sinuous, branching forms and intricate networks of cavities suggest organic systems of growth, circulation and interconnection. Solid matter and empty space become equally significant, inviting viewers to move around the sculptures and discover ever-changing perspectives, silhouettes and spatial relationships.

This interplay between material, perception and transformation continues in the Dust Paintings. Created from dust and residual material removed during the making of sculptures and reliefs, these works give discarded matter a new existence. Reassembled and built up in layers, the material forms richly textured surfaces that resemble eroded terrain, sedimentary deposits or fragments of an imagined geological landscape. The process establishes a cyclical relationship between creation and dissolution, in which what is removed from one work becomes the substance of another.

In The Dark Side of the Moon series, Flad translates the cratered surfaces of celestial bodies into tactile, abstract reliefs. Their shifting colours, textures and reflective qualities transform the act of looking into an active experience: depending on the viewer’s position and the changing light, different details emerge and recede.

Across these bodies of work, Flad reveals a form of natural logic in which erosion becomes creation, layering becomes accumulation, and transformation is never complete. Rather than presenting fixed images or definitive meanings, his works invite viewers to explore them physically and perceptually, discovering how colour, depth, texture and perspective continually reshape the encounter between artwork and observer.