The catalogue “Anne Neukamp. Impossible Object” is published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren. Anne Neukamp’s paintings and works on paper are dedicated to central questions of painting. To this end, she intensively explores the functionalities of visual communication. More than ever, pictorial symbols and language abbreviations determine our perception of the world. This also and above all applies to digital space, which has an impact on our understanding of what reality is and what is considered a representation of reality. Transferring this phenomenon to the analogue (and time-consuming) medium of painting and thus questioning its significance for our concept of the image is the aim of Anne Neukamp’s works. She thus makes reference to key developments and discourses of modernism, recognising them as relevant to our engagement with the present and tracing the mechanisms of image creation in the field of tension between self-referentiality and representation.

This monograph presents the first comprehensive survey of Anne Neukamp’s work. It embraces a vast selection of the artist’s works from the past seven years alongside texts by Kassandra Nakas, Reinhard Spieler and Johanna da Rocha Abreu, thereby offering the reader an immersive insight into the world of Neukamp’s painting.

‘A stage is being set for us. Forms are blocked and angled into space, complete with consideration of the need to bridge a distance and to draw the viewer in. As we approach the canvas, the beautiful execution, the smooth surfaces painted by hand, the neutral yet lush bottom layer almost lulls us into complacency. But then come the black and white strokes, like slashes, laid over or intersecting the crisp outlines of— well, what is it? A face or a bifurcated B? It doesn’t matter. Assertions held about the symbols and image being to shift. The flatness falls away and you find yourself eye-to-eye with the openings and gaps in the canvas like tunnels, and you finally have to let go of any lingering inertia. The figurative associations, the meaning both historical and implies, don’t ask for definition, they ask you to completely recondition the means by which you seek definition.’ —Johanna da Rocha Abreu