painting/painting over/not painting

an important feature of edith urban's work is the constructive balance of different colour-fields, of light and dark, heavy and light surfaces. it relates to a tectonic principle of composition, which evocates associations to architecture, but it also offers  landscape and space as an additional option. often different layers of colour are placed one on top of the other, so that the painting takes on the character of a relief. in this dense mass of colour the artist has introduced scratches: you see horizontal and diogonal lines or a quick  and hasty drawing, that also can be seen as a scribble. the vehemence of the strokes are in sharp contrast to the harmony  of the constructive colour-fields. Similarly (as with the two other artists) here the aspect of time emerges: this also has to do with a flowing, a flowing of texts, because we can make out sentences and fragments of texts in these paintings. in both cases the texts have to do with dying - also a kind of no man's land, if you might call it. there it says for example:

"night lay on my eyes 

and lead lay on my mouth/

 I lay on the bottom of the grave 

with paralysed brains and heart".

the text is practically written into the body of the painting, and thus not only reveals lower layers of colours but it also does it in a metaphorical way with us as the observers. that means it referes again and in a different way as  painting to our buried emotions and images. 

christian kaufmann, art historian
[at the occasion of the exhibition on september 2nd 2003 in darmstadt/kommunale galerie]