VERA PALME

OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, Vera Palme has built up a modest cult following with idiosyncratic shows at small art spaces; the fact that she is known to have rejected numerous offers from galleries and institutions alike has helped, too. But it would be unfair to claim that she owes her reputation to anything other than her fractious, self-reflective style of painting, whose radical immanence grabs you by the collar and articulates an alternative to the idea, still popular in Europe, of painting as essentially a hub for social and contextual references, which David Joselit labeled “painting beside itself.”

My first encounter with Palme’s works took place five years ago. It was at Kunstmuseum Bonn, in an agonizing fever dream of an exhibition, with mostly failed works by more than fifty emerging painters—though I’d have classed most of them, rather, as receding—where I suddenly found myself facing several medium-format pieces on undyed raw linen slathered with some resiny brown substance. In retrospect, I can’t remember what the pictures may have shown, maybe because what struck me most vividly was that material sensation. In their evident infatuation with the physical stuff of painting, there was something incredibly atavistic about these works; still, perhaps precisely because they seemed largely unschooled in the trends that dominated the medium at the time, they exuded a seriousness and genuinely open-minded sensibility. But something more than their physical appearance must account for my fascination with them; Palme’s paintings, after all, still stand out favorably now that a number of her contemporaries, like Dominique Knowles, Beaux Mendes, and Anastasia Pavlou, resort to a similar palette of chthonic earthy browns. Then again, those painters, proponents of what I call the New Mellowness, do not share Palme’s fondness for oozing impastos that look like they should be wet to the touch even after months.

So what is it that makes these works so special? For an entry point into the Frankfurt-based artist’s enigmatic oeuvre, you might start with Shed Sensitivity 1, 2022, a composition featuring small, freehand-drawn circles in shades of purple that coalesce into the pattern of a snakeskin glistening in the sunlight. As in other works, the unprimed natural fabric shows through the oily curls, quite as though the support merits equal attention. That effect is underscored by the edges of the painting, which are bounded by what Palme calls a strip frame, a polyester-fabric border printed with the same snakeskin pattern. One might be tempted to brush off the conjunction of the two analogies—skin-as-clothing and canvas-as-skin—as clichéd. Yet Palme manages to keep the metaphors fresh by methodically translating them into chunks of her personal painterly syntax. To begin with, similar strip frames grace pictures that are very different, like the brackish Desert Painting, 2020–22, and the snake pattern itself appeared in several of the works that were included in her show “Immer realistischere Malerei” (Ever More Realistic Painting) at Berlin’s Galerie Buchholz earlier this year. In particular, it’s dominant as a kind of freehand pointillistic filter on the sibling paintings Freewheeling (big cheese) and Freewheeling (little cheese), both 2024, where the strip frame, by contrast, is made of leather, another kind of skin. Zoom out further and you see even more clearly why it makes sense to think of Palme’s painting in dermatological terms. While those pictures that initially fascinated me luxuriated in the greasy-resiny surface quality of old, deteriorated oil paintings, other works at the time tended to look more like animal skins. Obviously, this painting is about skin—about skinning and casting off the past the way a snake sheds its skin.

Palme herself has shed a skin or two to get here. She is, you might say, a latecomer to art. Having studied humanities, she approached Berlin’s art scene with some book learning and an interested viewer’s eye, and was already in her early thirties when she enrolled at the city’s art academy. This would be so much biographical Muzak if her painting weren’t born from the tension between theoretical knowledge about painting and painterly practice. Just look at her palette, which at first primarily celebrated shades of brown redolent of Rembrandt and, even more, van Dyck—as though her point were to invoke the authority of unrivaled classics in a strategic admission of her own inferiority. She gradually enlarged her palette of ochers, adding a select few oranges and yellows and, most saliently, greens. Although her way of deploying this basic palette is unsyste­matic, a picture like – – (greens), 2024, may serve as a key to the logic of her color choices: The intimation of a flower still life scratched into the top layer cannot hide the fact that, more than anything else, this is about the stratification of paint, which comes into view along the edges. Layered hues from green through shades of golden ocher down to umber—in classic tempera painting, this would be exactly the understructure for (white) skin tones. Similarly, several works, such as Other Feelings, 2024, not only practice the conventional way of mixing skin colors in oil on linen—Palme’s preferred instrument—but positively perform it, which, in light of her consistent use of browns, puts another spin on the idea of “flesh tone.” 

Noticing this emphatic dramatization of painterly materiality, you might realize that Palme’s time at the university in the early 2000s coincided with the heyday of German media theory. Her focus is not on the representation of meaning but rather on the medial and material conditions of representation. And yes, such regurgitation of knowledge about painting’s history and its underlying conditions can easily curdle into a pose. If that’s not what happens in Palme’s pictures, even though they’re dripping with theoretical expertise, it’s thanks to her peculiar technique. Her brushwork palpably wants to get away from theory and into making, into experience, into building something. This attitude becomes manifest in a stylistic device that underlies almost every one of Palme’s pictures: She scratches into the paints, mixing them up, practicing a productive annihilation of the groundwork using shuffling motions whose directionless quality seems to ask: What’s the use of all that accumulated knowledge? How liberating it must feel to engage in a kind of post-Surrealist automatism and paint thousands of purple curls! Or to re-create, in Frankfurter Kreuz (Frankfurt Junction), 2023, the traffic patterns through a highway interchange known for its congestion, eliciting a contrary energy from the brushstrokes. Or to construct the frame immanent to the picture in the abovementioned Other Feelings, which she made by pushing the paint, with a seemingly mindless regularity, toward the center, plowing up the different layers in the process. We might almost call this practice en-passantism, that’s how much its charm rests on (provoked) contingencies.