Alan Ebnother / Gallery No.  1069

Alan Ebnother works ‘in green’: ‘Green is an infinitely calm colour.’ Yet in reality, dramas unfold in his paintings, which is why the artist insists that people look at them. ‘Bloody hell, just look at them! What on earth do you see? Do you think this is fun or romantic!’ Anyone who insists on seeing only green is certainly taking the easy way out. Ebnother, a trained ballet dancer who performed with the Neumann Company in Stuttgart and later in Hamburg, began using a palette knife and brush after 1975 to transpose the pas de deux onto the canvas: He piles the pigments on thickly, reaches into the monochrome green expanse and dances across the wet paint with a stroke of his palette knife or brush; the smooth surface is shaken by barely perceptible ripples of colour. In this way, the artist gives the paint form and shape – and only in this way, for he allows neither frame nor underdrawing to provide a firm anchor. Even the support itself seems to vanish beneath the impasto application of paint