Beate Günther

Hongda, 2002

Beate Günther came across K.R.H. Sonderborg as a painter in Stuttgart around 1980. His gestural and symbolic, black-and-white abstractions are derived from highly political themes. Beate Günther followed the radical quality of Sonderborg’s work, his thinking in series. But she has effectively sublimated the contemporary impetus of her pictures by going back to the ‘elements’ the pigments as the chemical basis of any painting. It could be said that the artist reflects ‘materially’ her observations of contemporary politics and history – in the medium of pure pigment, in the quasi historical development of a color via multipartite picture series. The picture Hongda built up from the pigments nickel-titanium yellow and ivory black is part of the artist’s engagement from the early 1990s onwards with the history of Vietnam. Beate Günther translates her observations of war-related destruction into abstract, monochrome pictorial landscapes.