PYRAMID PAINTINGS

In his series of the Pyramid Paintings, Niedling uses the soot of discarded and destroyed paintings as colorants for abstract gestural notations. Only when he has perfected his work on the Pyramid Paintings to the point that they unvaryingly satisfy him over a long sequence will the series find completion. After Niedling captured the soot of his scrapped works on glass plates in his Teilchen (2012) series, he now rubs it onto canvases in his Pyramid Paintings, creating a link to an imaging technology that harks all the way back to cave paintings. Niedling’s painting is a pause in the face of the oversized challenge of making the Pyramid Mountain a reality. The alternation of creation and destruction recalls the cycles of life, and the completion of the series resembles death in perfection.