Introduction

by Sibylle Badstübner-Gröger
(Article of approx. 500 words. Written for Ingrid Kerma's exhibition Paintings 1997)

Ingrid Kerma is an Anglo-American artist, who studied at Reading University and graduated form Goldsmith’s College, London. From 1976 she has created a body of work using encaustic on both paper and canvas, as well as hanging objects.

She comes from a tradition of artists who are non-representational, who don’t even want to use symbols. These artists remove themselves from a literal and explanatory subject matter and find themselves in the area of the not-seen, non-representational, an area that is not easy to accept. Her object-like canvases relate to nothing outside themselves, but rather prove anew, that painting depends principally on colour, line, form and space and highlighting these elements can itself be the content of a painting.

Ingrid Kerma reduces and simplifies, emphasising the concrete materiality of paint and wax. She ritualises her handling of paint, mixing, layering and scraping back, searching for the truth through artistic methods. One senses that the extent of this truth goes beyond existing patterns of thought and being, and should be felt as an aesthetic formula answerable only to itself.

The dominant role in this artistic search for truth is taken by the very act of painting. This allows Kerma flexibility and freedom of movement and form: horizontal and vertical stripes, squares and rectangles and the accidental experience arising from the uses of colour, line and surface, as seen in her vivid monochrome coloured compositions.

The use of pigment and encaustic gives the painting a life of it’s own. The monochrome colour on the canvas creates an echo within the viewer, enlivened by the visual accident between the forms and their edges. These evolve during the investigative painting process – constantly opening the way for new results.

Every time colour is taken away, separated or unified it affects the whole painting, its energy-fields and power sources. These fields of colour, lit from an indefinable light source, open up and reveal themselves to the viewer. The centrally set squares in the painting create a spatial depth, a rhythmic tension across the unity of the picture surface, creating a visual dialectic.

Looking for the truth in specific forms of existence cannot take place without deep reflection.

Kerma’s painting demand a way of seeing in which the painting alone is the object. The philosophical element in her work allows the audience to enter into discourse and begin a form of self-exploration. Her painting is condensed and concentrated, she does not decorate or entertain - rather she offers one the possibility of artistic answer on the nature of existence.

Ingrid Kerma thins in painting terms. Her thoughts proceed through colour, light and space. Colour fulfils the need of the eye and the soul. Without compromise and with direction she searches for the ideal of truth. It is, however, her desire to create stillness.