In October 2024, YveYANG gallery presented Kim Stolz’s debut exhibition in the United States. Recent Paintings marks her second exhibition at the New York gallery, where a new group of paintings reflects an evolution in her practice. Her works are true to the same concerns, but now somehow quieter and even more focused. Born in Berlin in 1995 and based in Düsseldorf, Stolz received her Meisterschüler diploma from the renowned Düsseldorf Academy in 2023 under Prof. Andreas Schulze.

Stolz has already established a reputation for subtle, small-scale paintings that maximise the inherent qualities of very particular materials. These elements are integrated with a lightness of touch that nonetheless yields a strong visual, painterly, minimalist, and lyrical presence. Stolz usually applies repeated strokes, turns of the brush, and stains of watercolour or gouache applied to linen. The close toned paint colour is in, as much as on, the material surface of these different fabric supports.

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Of the ten paintings here, half are 15¾ x 19¾ inches, four are 8¼ x 11⅜ inches, and one is 11¾ x 8¼ inches. Two works depart from this format: here, Stolz employs white acrylic on jute, building a geometrical relieved surface that appears almost embossed. These subtle changes in elevations cast shallow shadows that evince a similar sensitivity to light and contrast as the other, chromatically complex paintings.

Several of the paintings are placed close enough to each other as to be informally paired, others are distant from each other, differentiating the dialogue between individual paintings. The installation is spare and elegant, underscoring the distinct abstract, patterned, and atmospheric narrative of each painting. A certain mysteriousness inheres in each painting’s shifting, faceted spaces. Both Klee and Kupka come to mind as very distant relations in the tradition of abstract, intuitive, animate geometries, implying more than can be presumed from a quick read.

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Stolz executes her paintings horizontally, on the floor, layering paint in only a few passes in order to maintain the immediacy and freshness of the pictorial image as it appears, together with traces of temporality now made material. This is emphasized by her deft use of watercolour and gouache, paints developed for, and long associated with, spontaneous and direct painting on paper rather than the usual adjusted and modified approach to painting on linen or other supports.

There are no preliminary studies for the paintings as they are developed alla prima, through the experience of forming each composition, one move after the other. It is important to note that in titling the paintings with the chronometric time of day of their completion, the responsiveness to fleeting moments, and passing time, are openly acknowledged.

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The effects of her paintings are often felt as jewel-like dark radiances, take for example, 12:23 (2025). The brown, black, and tan horizontal strokes of the brush leave, in iterated sequences, rhythmic, soft musical score like modulations with an irregular beat across the picture plain, the deep blurred space that also fluctuates, a concurrent optically porous space at once elusive and mesmerising. In 16:43 (2025), the pale stain of thin white watercolour modifies the colour of the linen into which it has been stained. It invites associations with natural phenomena whilst remaining entirely of itself, physical and tactile, very much a material surface, free from directing the viewer elsewhere metaphorically, and yet irresistibly thoughts arise as to what this might recall but not control exactly, like a memory threatening to surface without thoroughly coalescing.

By deploying simple shape and line, as mark or grid, Stolz works with remarkably responsive intuition. Rather than producing cold formal accumulations, she defamiliarises these elements, transforming regular patterns or clean edges into moments of contingent balance, where compositions seem to emerge from the edge of potential chaos. On a steel-grey ground, and with only a drawn, curving, off-horizontal line to mark the beginning and end of a stroke, verticals of astringent pink gouache fade as the loaded brush runs out of paint. Simple, striped, and only two colours, yet the chromatic tension is just this side of dissonance, producing an effect of stark, beautiful luminescence.

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In both 16:56 (2025) and 18:01 (2025), Stolz appears to use a template or cut negative shape to press or fill repeated forms, here taking the shape of a triangle that rotates in orientation. In earlier works, Stolz has used a drinking glass as a profile to originate a painted shape. As in these current paintings, the origin of the shape is left undeclared; its ordinariness becomes a point of departure for lyrical inventions wholly appropriate to a modest, unpretentious process of seemingly wide and clearly ongoing possibility.

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Kim Stolz (b. 1995, Berlin, Germany) currently lives and works in Düsseldorf. In 2023, she earned a Meisterschüler diploma from the class of Prof. Andreas Schulze at Düsseldorf Art Academy, where her graduation presentation was honored with the Academy’s Jubilee Sponsorship Award. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Recklinghausen; Lucas Hirsch, Düsseldorf; YveYANG, New York; Linienstr. 28, Düsseldorf; and Villa de Bank, Enschede. Her work has also been shown in group exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Solingen; Kunstakademie, BBK Düsseldorf; and Super Super Markt, Cologne and Berlin. Stolz has exhibited across Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States.

David Rhodes is an artist and writer based in New York.

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