Frank Ettenberg: Selective Retrospective

New Concept Gallery, 610 Canyon Road, Santa Fe

For someone who has enthusiastically followed this accomplished painter’s career from the days when he was a key member of a Santa Fe group of abstractionists (which including Gene Newman, Sam Scott, John Connell, and Reg Loving) who began showing in the seventies at the Bob Tomlinson Gallery, it was more than salutary to witness the return of Frank Ettenberg to our contemporary art scene. I say “return,” since Ettenberg, in recent years, opted out of the City Different and established himself in an entirely more high-powered and competitive art environment, settling in Vienna, Austria.

This writer cannot help but respond to Ettenberg’s new circumstances and new work through a special lens of great personal familiarity with Vienna and its modern artistic heritage, its current contemporary art establishment, and the feisty milieu Ettenberg now has chosen to navigate. That “special lens” causes me to focus on those elements in Ettenberg’s work—many of them always present through recent decades—that seem to resonate in response to Austria’s particular contribution to the history of Modernism as the birthplace of Expressionism. In the land of Schiele and Kokoschka, Ettenberg likely feels immensely daheim, i.e. at home. Ettenberg’s paraphrased statement in conjunction with this exhibition, suggests that “there is a blending of remembered illusions, sensations of different locales and substances, and the play of different styles of painting which the artist has appreciated and made his own.”

Certainly the style of painting Ettenberg has made his own long ago is that of Abstract Expressionism. His particular voice within this great tradition tends toward grandeur and dynamic clashes between darkness and illumination; think of the volatile compositions by DeKooning, or the lyricism of, say, Joan Mitchell, when pacing this show. In a couple of especially compelling paintings, Fasching’s Puzzle and Alps in his Guts, we’re struck by the sensation of large-scale and tumultuous forces at play in what were, paradoxically, relatively small-scale compositions. In Alps in his Guts, heaving, lunging tectonic shapes (are we in the Tirol?) seem to echo the bracing, thin air of Alpine upper reaches, conveyed by luscious swathes of piney greens and, seemingly far below, a dazzling blue body of water.

The dynamism of his response to extremely dramatic landscape “allows one’s intuitions, and colorful mysteries, to flourish,” Ettenberg observes. The Alps in his guts have the same jagged vigor we associate with the great Walchensee Alpine paintings of Lovis Corinth, in the 1910s and ’20s and, like Corinth, Ettenberg’s works, with his slashing brushiness and churning impasto, hovers somewhere between abstract Im-pressionism and Ex-pressionism simultaneously. In point of fact, as his press release states, “his work is finely tuned to the interplay of feelings and impressions, to the give and take of brushstrokes, figures, and grounds... so this art is pregnant with variable readings and meanings.” In sum, a tour de force show for Frank Ettenberg—welcome back!

Jan Adlmann



Published in THE magazine, Santa Fe, October 2008, page 57.

Text used with permission.

Alps in His Guts  
2000, 20 x 10" (51 x 25 cm), Acrylic on Canvasboard