Tropfenbild, blau

When creating his »Drip Pictures«, Thomas Emde allows the paint to trickle across the canvas and over the edge of the picture ground. This work’s layered structure is a result of the simultaneously controlled and chance movement of the paint flowing down the picture. When dry, it is possible to identify dense and empty areas in the structured surface of the paint, which rises above the once flat canvas, while on the sides, where the rivulets of paint expire, it appears to float above the picture ground. In this manner the paint can be experienced in both its coloristic and material-sculptural quality.

Emde’s relief-like »Drip Pictures« bear a certain resemblance to Jackson Pollock’s famous »Action Paintings«, in which he scraped, sprayed, and dropped the paint onto the canvas in a free and uninhibited fashion. But while Pollock used the paint as a trail of psychological expression, Emde liberates the paint from its subjective appropriation by the artist, employing it as an independent design element with its own dynamics and thus enriching the recognized creative possibilities of painting.