19 April to 12 June 1996
Chris Newman »Me in a no-time state«
Cabinet Exhibition in the window

Chris Newman’s work hits the nerve centre of the museum. It is disconcerting due to its familiarity. Five diptychs showing major modern paintings are on display – these are not the originals, but rather copies of paintings which have been filtered through Chris Newman, thus becoming originals themselves. Newman uses as a basis works by ten painters which have become important to him for very personal reasons. He paints them anew from postcards in his own style in order to charge them with his own meaning and at the same time, overcome them. In addition, to do justice to the equality of perception, two pieces of music may be heard – an acoustical diptych, in which Chris Newman, who as a composer and pupil of Mauricio Kagel began composing his own works in the early 1980s, makes reference to pre-classical and Romantic music. He entwines himself with the works he deals with in order to experience more and to abolish chronology: “Me in a no-time state” is an exhibition about the presence of the past and vice versa; a disregard of chronological time (“…all paintings to be looked at stem from the past and all are being viewed in the present.”) Chris Newman works with the virtuosity of incompetence. He trusts in the intensity of personal statement, in the artistic directness which pertains to life, to his life which serves as an example of humanity. He exploits this life, he works in it as if in a laboratory. Newman wants to free art from artificiality and get to the point of perception: He is not concerned with the medium, painting or music or about style and art history. His aim is that perception itself becomes concrete. The work of art itself is the catalyst for the existential experience of life.

(Artist Book)

Art museum of the
Archdiocese of Cologne