It’s an intuitive and seasonal association, perhaps slightly mundane, certainly spurred by the coastal region I find myself in as I begin putting ideas on Ina Gerken’s work into words. With her paintings in mind and the sea in sight, my thoughts wander a proximate territory, where the terminology of coastal ecology washes ashore: words such as littoral, which denotes the threshold between sea and land, where a diverse mix of organic debris links the marine system to the terrestrial one by providing resources for coastal food webs. Let me narrow this range to what is known as the foreshore or intertidal zone, the area above water at low tide and underwater at high tide. I drift off in other directions occasionally but keep coming back to it with tide-like reliability.
Gravel, Tumble, Wings, Sea at Night. Some of the titles of Gerken’s recent body of work reinforce my marine reference. After the artist shared them, the initial mental image settles like sediment. And with it, the symbolic meaning of flotsam and jetsam as odds and ends, which initially floated all too evidently on the surface. Indeed, Gerken’s gestural paintings comprise a heterogeneous mix of things, of oddly shaped forms, diverse structures, dispersed remnants, relics and traces that prompt you to ponder their origin. However, another parallel feels more fundamental: By channeling the accumulation of water- and wind-driven sand, beach wrack contributes to the shaping of dunes and plays a key role in the formation of entire coastal regions. Much like paint on a canvas, the material deposited in the intertidal zone compresses, condenses, and stores up (even shores up?) physical as well as historical processes, in other words: time.
Gerken describes the movements manifest in her many-layered compositions as spontaneous: driven by intuition and a lively dialogue between herself and the painting. Pigments settle into the shape of multiform marks, strokes, or fields, then are partially eroded or scraped off again. Gerken’s works gradually build up in layers of paint and silk paper. While the final pieces rarely reveal the sequence of sedimentation, the painter’s actions are palpably compressed in them. Gerken gives us a glimpse of her process and its physicality: For the large formats, which she has produced more frequently in recent years, she lays the canvas out on the floor so that she can move around in the picture and occasionally step out of it to examine the status quo, in the way Jackson Pollock most famously did – or before him, Janet Sobel. Which brings us to deposits of art history, more precisely, to the gendered dimension of the modern movement(s) Gerken’s work evokes no less evidently than her own bodily ones.
Gerken, who was awarded the prestigious Pollock-Krasner grant in 2023, doesn’t deliberately shift between “delegated” and “distanced” identities like Lee Krasner did, where self-exploratory gestures and compositions countered the trite trope of painting as a predominantly male mode of (self-)expression, instead highlighting painting’s potential to convey more complex subjectivities – subjectivities that overcome the Kantian division between body and mind, as well as the separation of collective and individual experience. Gerken’s painterly subjectivity may shine through more subtly, but it is characterized by a similar sense of complexity. When she describes her gestures and compositions as “subconscious” (as opposed to the Freudian unconscious), her words suggest an interesting slip that appears to reveal the interference of a collective feminist consciousness (as opposed to the idealist, Jungian collective unconscious), thus bearing witness to the lived experience of generations of female painters. To bring it back to the beach: Gerken’s work is part of a new wave of abstract, gestural painting that comes with inherited burdens as persistent as microplastics but that can – with its potent material and formative qualities – contribute to shaping the field. While every piece of gravel is shaped by time and motion, the bigger picture holds heaps of sand to grind the gears of a system whose tides surely keep turning.
Essay by Anna Sinofzik
