David Ostrowski

Book excerpt: German painter David Ostrowski (born 1981) widens his spectrum of meditations on the color red with The Thin Red Line. Ostrowski has long experimented with chromatic hues on white or neutral background, but it took him almost a decade to go back to investigating the scarlet shade--a coloring bearing social and cultural implications, besides playing a fundamental part on the history of painting. Made using found material and canvases painted with acrylic and lacquer, Ostrowski's recent work are an exploration of the absence and presence of the color. Published on the occasion of the same-titled solo show, the artist's first with Sprüth Magers in London, in collaboration with Karma Books, the catalog--characterized by a red Pantone that changes its tone when printed on the pages made of three different papers, mirroring the artist's chromatic research--is to be considered as further piece of the exhibition, featuring a series of texts Ostrowski commissioned from writers and academics, with the word "red" as the only instruction.