Mai 36 Galerie is delighted to present a solo exhibition of works by Austrian artist Ernst Caramelle. For more than 40 years, Ernst Caramelle has explored questions of reality and illusion within the context of art through a variety of media such as wallpainting, drawing, photography and video. His conceptually based work addresses aspects such as the production, reproduction and perception of art.

Caramelle’s paintings in coloured, mostly geometric, forms deploy duplication, mirroring, and varied repetitions to describe views fragmented by different perspectives. The result – whether on wood, paper, carboard, or wall – is a spatial effect that allows transitions to flow optically into one another, blurring the boundaries between reality and illusion. The fresco-like wallpaintings in watercolour also have an illusionistic effect: the perspectival portrayal of their geometrically abstract forms evokes three-dimensionality and depth, so that the boundary between the exhibition space and the painted space appears blurred.

Mai 36 Galerie presents works by the artist from 1996 to the present day, including two wallpaintings specially created for this exhibition. Whereas the early abstract work Quasi Quasi (Fresco fax) from 1996 merely hints at an illlusion of space, later works such as final cut (2008) and Untitled (-) (2013) are more conceptual and geometric in structure: individual forms combine in planarity and depth, merging with the transparency and opacity of the materials to converge in an ultimately illusionistic portrayal.

Ernst Caramelle (*1952 in Hall/Tyrol, Austria) lives in Frankfurt, Karlsruhe and New York and has been a professor at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe since 1994. A participant in the 1992 documenta IX, his works are now represented in such renowned collections as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the MUMOK in Vienna vertreten. The Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht is currently showing a solo exhibition of his works through to November 2017.