Into The Unknown Jürgen Trautwein’s exhibition “Into the Unknown” is his ninth exhibition of paintings at 60SIX. Consistent with most of his painting series the artist used found objects as the canvas. Large print fashion ads in a hanging banner format provide a front and back surface for the work. Echoing a past suite of works called “Skins”, both sides of the banners have a painted surface. In the series “Skins”, images showed through monochrome paintings and the back was latent but mostly invisible unless turning the piece. In this case the backside becomes the front, which presents controlled accidents made with additive and subtractive processes. Surfaces are built with unpredictable texture, color and composition. Nuances of printmaking, particularly mono printing appear, where the pealed paint from the studio floor merge with paint bleeding through the front. Unexpected images emerge, reminiscent of aerial topography or landscapes. No boundary exists here in what mark came from what circumstance. Trautwein violating the surface within a finessed dance of intention, chaos, deliberation and accident, results in a rich, unbridled sensibility to these paintings. Gwen Terpstra, Gallery 60SIX, San Francisco, 2023 R_u_Sirius Jürgen Trautwein presents his new suite of paintings in an eighth exhibition with 60SIX, “R u Sirius”. His practice of using found objects continues as in this series found cast- off printed vellum maps of game animals and stars constellations act as the canvas, both showing through and at times creating resistance with the acrylic paint. Jürgen has an uncanny ability to seemingly effortlessly integrate elements of subjects or materials he confronts in daily life into his paintings. In these paintings the artist’s brush marks subtly or boldly disintegrate and deconstruct. In some pieces the marks from the maps below show through the paint as a curious pattern or code. Trautwein’s deliberate manner allows his color fields and wide brush gestures to interact with the found object substrate and create an unlabored aesthetic, not precious, nor overly worked. The artist says about his paintings: "They are voids of no incident encouraging a state of contemplative meditation in the viewer. The name of the series married with the outer space maps suggest the absurdity and inevitably of our precarious current relationship with the larger universe and the microscopic world. This angst resides just beneath the surface in our lives and below the artist’s confident gesture. Gwen Terpstra, Gallery 60SIX, San Francisco, 2022 If Yesterday were Tomorrow, Today would be Sunday In this series, old newsprint collages from the mid 90’s live under acrylic paint. The artist used mainly San Francisco Chronicle & Examiner Sunday papers using a wheat flour based gluing process in multiple layers revealing bends, wrinkles, folds and resulting in unexpected refractions. The agitated surfaces become rich and nuanced while unlabored. The creases and lines and pools of paint are reminiscent of his set of works from the Topography series as well as earlier work on antique linen where minimal fields are interrupted by paint sticking to folds and creases. The artist says of his new series, "Yestermorrow" reflects on the idea of re-thinking, re-evaluation, re-painting, re-creation, re-cycling and re-definition." The paintings are, he says, “silent reminders of erased content, voids of no incident.” Trautwein’s paintings often feel like objects that have undergone a reaction. The materials are fully present and embodied in the object. The artist’s title If Yesterday were Tomorrow Today would be Sunday, illustrates his zen approach. The logic is absent, and we are left only with the present moment and the object and our experience of it. Gwen Terpstra, Gallery 60SIX, San Francisco, 2020 Back to Where I Never Was Back to Where I Never Was" is a conceptual painting series that deals with the basic idea of the brush-stroke as such. It has been executed in a targeted spontaneous painting mode, with no purpose or intension; a disclosure of the process of painting on the basis of the stroke - the elementary force of painting. The series is part of various painting projects from the past 5 years, which are based almost exclusively on recycled material. The paintings were painted on wooden panels, which were stored for more then 20 years in the studio partially untouched, or used for previous projects. Gallery Marek Kralewski, Art Karlsruhe, 2019 The Sound of the Rain needs no Translation. This reductive suite of paintings, like most of Trautwein’s series’ uses visual and conceptual content from his last body of work as momentum into the next. In “Train Ride to Luxor” the flat horizontal paintings with a trancelike light inner white glow bounced the viewer’s eye from flat space to deep space and back again. In the new work the viewer steps almost entirely into the deep white space where color practically disappears from the edges, almost like entering Doug Wheeler’s “infinity room” of white light and nothingness. This series’ title and it’s individual paintings translate the work’s embodiment of zen notions of the here and now. Like a Robert Ryman painting or a Jon Zurier, this work sits quietly and demands only a deep breath. Trautwein has dual sets of work in his practice. His drawings and video works (some of which he calls hypertexts) with line drawings and doodles, sound and his signature “time sheets” (recycled letter sized paper) sublimate nervous energy and illuminate randomness and chaos as they satirize politics, technology, and as the artist says,”perpetually reoccurring human folly.” His paintings provide an escape to the calm and serenity of the present moment. The viewer finds their own meaning in confronting these minimal paintings. Gwen Terpstra Gallery 60SIX,San Francisco, 2019 TRAIN RIDE TO LUXOR "Train Ride to Luxor" is a series of paintings recalling a segment of a 5 month journey through Southern Europe, the Middle East and Egypt. These paintings refer to the experience of traveling in a train from Cairo to Luxor. This series is focusing on the view out of a window on a moving train in the heat of the midday sun. "Train Ride to Luxor" looks into the trans-like gazing at the passing of the landscape, the blurred vision between light and dark, movement and stillness and the stark contrast of the glaring sun in a train compartment full of diesel smoke. San Francisco, 2018 OFL Old Family Linen and the Endurance of Folds "OFL" is Jürgen Trautwein’s series of predominantly reversible paintings on antique family linen, some pieces up to 150 years old. The series is part of his evolving “traces of times past” multidisciplinary art project using found materials. Trautwein dedicates "OFL" to all mothers, claiming these paintings honor mothers, grandmothers, aunts, great aunts and ancestors, who kept their linens meticulously and carefully folded, where the material embodies a sense of history…with an energy, he says, “radiating invisible traces of love, joy, birth, suffering and death.” The folds and creases and quiet details become the structural base for monochrome paintings punctuated minimally with traces of seams, hand embroidered monograms, cut edges and buckled or wrinkled areas. In some pieces the artist uses a process of transferring paint off of plastic sheeting under the painting on the floor of his studio. His process of painting on plastic from his 2015 “Sister Seven” series is given a new life within this process of transferring paint randomly off plastic, and we also see a few multi-colored pieces echoing the “Topography” series where his paintings on vellum were wrinkled up, letting paint pool randomly into complex textures and satellite map-like patterns. The series is peppered with occasional painted patterns of dots or stripes that seem to have a sense of humor or ask a question. Are they pixels or polka dots...Passé reminders of what was once real? Trautwein’s "OFL" paintings are quiet, meditative, absent of form, detached from an intentional outcome and expansive in their bestowal of the process of change. Gwen Terpstra Gallery 60SIX,San Francisco, 2016 SISTER 7 In his series “SISTER 7” Jürgen Trautwein investigates resistance and transparency in painting. His practice of using found objects in his work continues as in this series clear plastic roof sheeting acts as the canvas, creating resistance with the acrylic paint. Jürgen has an uncanny ability to seemingly effortlessly integrate elements of subjects or materials he confronts in daily life in his work. Concept, process and materials unite in his practice and overall body of work, (i.e. line drawings, photos, videos, paintings). In “SISTER 7” strokes of paint form chance puddles, drops and explosions when hitting the industrial plastic. Energetic marks travel a meandering, unpredictable path. Several coats of varnish then confine and trap the paint almost as if frozen while in escape or motion…resulting in pictures that become controlled accidents. Trautwein plays with transparency by layering the paintings in some cases, where the overlap exposes the activity and color below. In the more minimal spacious pieces the paint suggests live organisms poised for inspection in a Petri-dish. Other works show the artist’s brush marks subtly or boldly as they disintegrate and deconstruct. Universal metaphors could be implied with political overtones in the exploration of “resistance and transparency.” Trautwein’s deliberate manner and trust in allowing these materials (plastic, paint, varnish) to simultaneously marry and repel, create extremely diverse moods; from violence to calm. Gwen Terpstra, Gallery 60SIX, San Francisco, 2015 Archaea "Archaea" are no-mind paintings - works that grow out of controlled accidents. Refering to the kingdom of single-celled microorganisms, Archaea is a watercolor series with the idea in mind of growing life-forms by means of painting. Through the process of applying watercolor on wet surfaces, through puddle- building, gravity, overflow, drainage, evaporation and dehydration those paintings come to life. They exist as they are and are merely the results of slowly drying puddles of colored-water on heavy duty water color paper. "Archaea" are process oriented watercolors, they grow spontaneously out of a few brushstrokes, which are left to transform themselves according to temperature, humidity and gravity. The drying process transforms the pieces into organic shapes that could resemble gentle, gigantic, prehistoric bacteria floating in over-dimensional Petri-dishes. San Francisco, 2014 Brittles "Brittles" are paintings in acrylic on collages using sheets of the official news-journal of the village of Sulzfeld - located in the Kraichgau in south-western Germany - by glueing them into irregular shapes and then painting on them. The series is a two in one painting project; which means, that each side of each collage is used as a painting surface questioning the meaning of the front (which is usualy "the painting") and the back of a painting. The series explores shapes, contours and imaginary borders of continents, countries, counties, districts, cities, towns and villages, inclusions and exclusions, demarcations and delimitations as if seen from a fictional satellite point of view. "Brittles" are irregular shaped reductive-monochrome paintings scarred by accidental scratches and spills, showing traces of various colors. Sulzfeld, 2013/14 Skins "Skins" are monochromatic paintings in acrylic on various geometrically ordered collages, which consist of multiple sheets of letter-size paper. "Skins" grow out of papers called “time-sheets”, which are unwanted drawings, paintings, prints, sketches, notes, flyers, form-letters, texts, everything ready to be torn up and thrown away, or anything considered not being a “finished” art-piece in the 8,5 x 11 inches paper format. These “time-sheets” end up in various “recycle stacks” spanning over a long period of time. The joining of the single “time-sheets” (most of them printed, or worked on from both sides) is very intuitive, so the backsides are accidental fusions of various documents of time, preserving the provisional quality of a stack of used paper, while still displaying all personal content from a time-span of about twenty years.  Through the gluing and multilayered painting processes the single sheets meld together into smooth, wavy and wrinkly, monochrome light-fields, revealing faint indications of their geometrical structure. "Skins" are shielded personal landscapes, uneven, almost aged surfaces that conceal private information, transcending into empty quietness; meaning- and timeless abstract spaces of open interpretation. They are  silent reminders of erased content, voids of no incident encouraging a state of contemplative meditation in the viewer. Gallery 60SIX,San Francisco, 2014