Rainer Gross

Rainer Gross‘ ‘Contact Logo’ paintings are a collection of pictures that utilise corprate brands – which we as consumers    in    a    capitalistic    and globalized world immediately recognize even in their smallest fragments – as part of his ongoing series of contact paintings. The use of logos by painters is not new – since    the    1940s corporate    brands    have played a large part in contemporary art – but what Gross does is new, his painting technique reduces a clean corporate identity to an image of decay, crumbling, peeling, weather worn, a criticism of
capitalism and corporate identity.

Surface tension
Abstract painters Wlodzimierz Ksiazek and Rainer Gross, in a show at Alpha Gallery, both manipulate the surfaces of their paintings. Ksiazek, using oil paint and cold wax, carves into his surface, making sculptural paintings. They are like the ghosts of architectural edifices, scarred and scored and brooding. Most are largely monochromatic with hints of other tones.

Verdict: Delectable and resonant abstractions. If you have an appetite for sensuous experiences, head to Marcia Wood Gallery. Rainer Gross' paintings are scrumptious.

You can brush, trowel, press, throw, squirt, drip or pour paint onto a canvas, or stain it with diluted medium. It has all been done.
Rainer Gross makes paint adhere to the support in yet another way in order to arriving
at compelling abstract compositions. Since the early 90s this New York-based artist from Cologne has experimented with the monotype techniques, here adapting them to create the body of paintings ("Contact Paintings"), that he displayed -together with six monotypes on paper- at Axel Raben.

With eyes resting on an old pipe in a small room in a monstrous gallery building on the west side of Chelsea, its painted coating ravaged with cracks and flaking, my mind wandered back into memory. How many times had it been repainted? How many and why specific colors? What had happened since that last fresh coat? Who’d been born, or died? Why did I find myself thinking about the paintings of Rainer Gross?

This New York-based German artist makes sensuous abstract paintings by a process of his own invention that involves fusing two paintings face to face and then pulling them apart. Exhibited singly or as diptychs, the paintings look like flaking wall sections. They have lush, supersaturated colors and dry, crusty surfaces that look like velvet from a distance.