Frank Gerritz

Frank Gerritz is a post minimalist artist known for graphite pencil and oil paintstick drawings that interact with the surrounding space and light, as well as the position of the viewer. Executed on walls, columns, MDF panels, and anodised aluminium, his densely layered geometric drawings posses sculptural qualities that indicate a physical visual space–depending on the texture of the surface, they absorb, reflect, or describe their environment. The artist explains,“There is this three-dimensional thing, because it is a drawing, but it is also a wall sculpture. Here, what is left over is really the space, which is normally lined up with hard edges, a horizontal and a vertical. In here it is all one; you can dive into it.”

The Center Drawing (1994) is an early work that incorporated figuration and movement into Gerritz’s minimalist vocabulary. Drawn the width of the artist’s shoulders, the black pencil drawing on a white gallery wall functioned as architecture, in the form of a door, or as a projection screen since viewers who approached the work could distinguish the colors and forms of their own bodies. Over the course of his career Gerritz has extended his oil paintstick polished surfaces to rectangular sections of sanded fibreboard, aluminum, and auction catalogue pages featuring famous works by appropriation artists such as Andy Warhol, Richard Price, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein.

Gerritz’s work has been shown at institutions such as Museum für Moderne Kunst in Bremen, Musée de Pontoise in France, Gemeentemuseum in Den Haag, Centre d’art contemporain in Annemasse, Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany, Kunstraum Neue Kunst in Hannover, and Old College Gallery at the the University of Delaware in Newark. He is the recipient of Hamburg’s Edwin Scharff Prize.