Jule Korneffel
Grant awarded Fall 2015
website: http://www.julekorneffel.com/
I would like to thank Elaine Kossak, Drew Beattie, and the entire Kossak committee for this travel grant. My journey to New Mexico and Marfa, Texas, and the research I undertook there, have been an extraordinary and unforgettable experience, which my artistic practice has benefited from greatly.
I am very grateful for the generosity of the donation, which enabled me to take as much time and carefor my travel as needed.
It has been a long-awaited desire of mine to explore the vast landscapes and different kinds of deserts in New Mexico and Texas, and to travel to the remote places which were home to Agnes Martin and Donald Judd. My artistic aspiration was to consider whether the width and emptiness of such landscapes had an impact on the making of the art of Martin and Judd, and whether such vastness enhances reductive abstraction in general.
It was the first time ever that I could leave New York City since moving here from Germany two years ago. To know first-hand the contrast between the vibrant New York City and landscapes in Europe that I was familiar with so far and the wide and open spaces of New Mexico and Texas has been a transformative experience. These concrete and powerful experiences in actual time and space have opened up new perspective in my artistic practice, and could not be replaced by anything else.
Thank you!
What I love is, spring out of bed in the morning, watching snow falling on a winter day.
I want art to be resistent to verbalize, its territory where words cannot reach. As a void is such a
condition. I see art. It’s a container that holds an empty state of mind.
I do what I love. Jumping in the void is one of them. All I can see is beginnings. I always start out
of blankness in which I inscribe, mostly in paint. A layered dialectic movement in stillness that
paths to the core. Who s there?
Nothing is a thing. In my process the furthest concentration of thoughts paired with the
maximization of my minimalist sensibility; I need to follow an unnameable and improvised
stream of thought and feeling. Fascinating, that reduction and introversion can lead to
expansion.
I concretize dialogues I believe in. An inner listening via reduction calling out the last drop. What
is truth though it is all open? The image comes immediately but reveals slowly. Good, there’s no
way to saying that right, just a set of values about lightness in accepting shifting awareness as a
state of human wisdom and self connection —Great things can be quiet. Or, little.
When suddenly a cat appears and a bird escapes up in the sky,— I sit with a cappucchino.
