“Once upon a time there was square, a circle, a triangle and a rectangle and the passion for color and form”.
Tatjana Busch’s words remind us of the Bauhaus. Indeed, the artist has close connections to the German Bauhaus way of thinking as well as to Russian Suprematism and the Dutch De Stijl movement, or neoplasticism. Most of all, her works echo Josef Albers’ famous squares and his studies of the interplay between colors, and they also recall Malevich’s Black Square. But what does Tatjana Busch actually do with these icons of classic modern art? She crumples them, turning their clear, precise, geometric forms into something mobile, playful and baroque. Had these works been created in the 1980s, they might have been categorized as “anything goes” post-modernism. She would have been said to be rebelling against the rational forms of dogmatic, rigid modernism by quoting history and approaching it with irony, appropriating and treating it subjectively. And yet, in the case of Tatjana Busch, none of this is true. Tatjana does not feel the need to liberate herself from anything by giving her art a theoretical underpinning. Instead, she says: “It could be like this and it could also be like that…”. There is no contradiction – and no contradiction with ironic intent – between the geometric and the distorted, the minimalist and the baroque, or the solid and the light. In Tatjana’s work the coincidental is one important factor; the search for shapes and colors is an intuitive process.