In the history of chromatics, black - like white and grey - is considered a non-coloured extreme. The monochrome painting and drawing of the 20th century continued to underline this special role, making colour and the picture area completely congruent. As a rule, monochrome images depict no object; indeed, they are not even abstract, since they represent nothing but their own factual existence. Their reduction allows for a concrete aesthetic experience of the image’s own laws via materiality, structure, texture and pictorial technique. But what happens when such autonomous art is allied with public space? Since the 1990s, Reinhold Budde has worked systematically with monochrome image processes in painting, lithography and drawing. In the main, his work is devoted to the colour black, whereby he avoids individual painterly expression to the greatest possible extent. His paintings and works on paper represent nothing; avoiding the reproduction of objects, consequently they are only legible to a certain extent. The semantic range of the colour black (such as mourning, revolt, Existentialism, idealism, evil, an extreme, a non-colour, a liturgical colour, personal preference or the like) proffers no statement about the conceivable content of the images. In principle, here legibility emerges by structural means alone, insofar as it is possible to grasp the formal rules immanent in the image. In the case of Budde’s works that he has termed layer paintings, oil paint is applied step by step in a mechanical and contemplative manner, always by his own hand, so that finally the translucent colour on the surface is concentrated into a membrane saturated in black. At the edges of these unframed canvases, bright-coloured layers of paint may remain visible. The other way around, in some lithographic works the black appears to be dissolved, as the drawing with lithographic crayons emerges as a result of compact, lengthwise motions of the hand differentiated by tiny dots.1 Budde’s monochrome painting, lithography and drawing visualises the richly balanced inner structures of his paintings and works on paper, making these structures tangible. However, Budde goes one step further and binds them to a location: a specific, publicly accessible place.
For the platform “Spring!” - which formed part of the “Bremen Kunstfrühling” to which 49 artists were invited in 2009 - Budde suggested blackening two track beds in a former goods shed. In this way, he was remembering an historical occurrence that took place even before the construction of the shed in the post-war years. Today, the extensive complex is used by artists, musicians and those working in the theatre. For more than 13 years now, galleries, rehearsal rooms, studios, and exhibition or events locations have been renting the partially decaying industrial sheds and cellar areas. In the past, goods trains were dealt with here; all but one of the seven platforms are still intact. The steady, non-dazzling fall of daylight through a shed (saw-tooth) roof into the structure as a whole, as well as an expansive view into the 180-metre long, almost 80-metre wide track shed are already extraordinary visual phenomena in themselves.
Budde uses his work to relate two parallel sets of tracks to one another. It is not possible to cross the two track beds, and the viewer stands at a 90-degree angle to the platforms. The blackened areas are each 11 metres, 41 centimetres long and entirely flush with one another. The width of the track bed measures 330 cm; the platforms are 150 cm high. Loose granulated coal is heaped in the front gravel bed until the bumps have been levelled and then tough, firmly adhering bitumen is applied to the visible wall behind it. Bitumen and granulate are refuse products from the industrial processing of fossil carbon. The deep black, shiny bitumen is produced during the processing of mineral oil. The matt-shimmering, dry granulate is a waste product of burning in blast furnaces, and it is hygroscopic. Its colouring fluctuates between black and the grey of slag according to the surrounding level of humidity. It becomes clear that the sections of track belong together as soon as the track bed, which is lower down, shifts into our field of vision.
Black is both “lying” on the ground and “hanging” on the insertion into the ground. 11.41 can be understood as a spatial-image that affirms itself as an aesthetic counterweight to the technical functionalism of the goods shed. Here, disorientation and a sense of being overwhelmed - aesthetic impressions often evoked by large-format monochrome painting - only ensue in connection with the surrounding space and via knowledge of the title’s background. As well as being the length of the blackened parts, 11.41 also refers to November 1941. In this month, more precisely on 18.11.1941, 570 Jewish citizens of Bremen were deported to a ghetto in Minsk. Only six of them survived.2 Before this background, it becomes clear that the proportions, placement and colour of the work all play a part in defining and re-interpreting the actual spatial situation: the influence of the location means that visitors are called upon to view the work actively, while walking. This artistic intervention creates a connection to the place, which – starting out from the dark artefact – heightens our awareness of the surrounding space and of our own orientation within it. As well as the sinking perspective, the experience of being in motion is essential to an understanding of the blackened areas. The qualities of the material and its processing, the work’s positioning within the shed, its reflection on public space and how it is handled, the transition from an image with its own set of rules to the context-related self-affirmation of an installation: all these factors come together in a concise artistic standpoint. Budde works with black to achieve maximum concretisation by reducing the interpretable. The image - whether it is a drawing, a lithograph, a painting or a three-dimensional image - retains its own moments of silence, even of resistance. The title of the work creates additional meaning: the spatial perception is also a counter-image to mass deportation at daybreak. The number 11.41 is a reminder of this historical atrocity in public space; a nameless energy is given to the artistic blackening as a result.
1 Cf. The entry on Reinhold Budde in Jens Peter Koerver: Slow Food, exh. cat. “Bilder vom Stein”,
Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in der Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich 2005.
2 The deportation of Bremen’s Jews to Minsk has been the subject of historical research and is well documented.
Regina Bruss: Die Bremer Juden unter dem Nationalsozialismus, in: Veröffentlichungen aus dem Staatsarchiv der
Freien Hansestadt Bremen, ed. Wilhelm Lührs, 49/1983, Bremen 1983; Deportation Bremer Juden nach
Minsk. Gedenkveranstaltung aus Anlaß des 49. Jahrestages der Deportation Bremer Juden am 18. November
1941 in die NS-Vernichtungslager bei Minsk, ed. Initiativkreis Gedenkfahrt nach Minsk, Bremen 1990; “... sind
Sie für den geschlossenen Arbeitseinsatz vorgesehen ...” »Judendeportationen« von Bremerinnen und Bremern
während der Zeit der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft, revised by Günther Rohdenburg, ed.
Staatsarchiv Bremen, Bremen 2006.