Dear Tim,

Thank you for inviting me for the show. But also for sending your latest sales books which look truly impressive. Since you are ranked #1 Broker in The Hamptons according to The Wall Street Journal, I especially reached out to you. Their cinematic photography in addition to the flowery marketing poetry inspired me to create some new works. Because your books are produced from offset prints for large editions, I thought it was an interesting twist to translate this technique and the book's purpose of economic stimulus into exclusive artworks in small editions. At the same time they also refer back to 2019 when my research on the syntax of architecture started.

Together with my wife I traveled to Long Island during the summer holidays to dive into its rich artistic history with Pollock, Krasner, Frankenthaler and Motherwell (to name just a few) who all took their breaks here from hectic New York City during the 50's and 60's. I really don't know what I thought when I brought my little gouache paint to this environment. Maybe becoming a new miniature version of a post-abstract-expressionist painter. But luckily it turned out different. We didn’t just dive into the history of The Hamptons but also into its pools. Even our little wooden house near the ocean didn't have one by itself, we were surrounded by all these gigantic properties with pools in all styles. My conceptualist nature pulled me towards the many real estate agencies where I got all kinds of sales books including your ads. Suddenly my gouache made sense when I started painting away on the pages anything but the status symbols like post-classicist columns, opulent portals and especially the pools. Feeling ambivalent towards such decadent ornaments ever since, these morning hours of painting-away became my daily ritual during our three weeks holidays and left me with this collection of little architectural fragments instead of colorful spots on a canvas. Back home these hoovering blue and green shapes inspired me to create similar flat bronze pools on which you hit hard when you try to take your dive. Sculptures without depth. Their surface attracts your mind but repulses your body. They pull you in like the seductive images and texts in the sales books are supposed to. Or even much better like John Steinbeck's writing who was also living on Long Island and whom I read during this travel. In Of Mice and Men (1937) which he wrote after the Great Depression in the USA, the two protagonist drifters gaze into a narrow, green and deep (natural) pool and dream of their own house in a better future. But since Steinbeck's novel ends tragically at the same pond where it began, the murky water for me became a dialectical metaphor of both dream and doom as an analogy of today's economic driven world. What about those who can afford their own fresh pool to escape the world as their morning ritual? What comes after the fulfillment of our material dreams? When we emerge from the water like the ageing Neddy in John Cheever's The Swimmer (1964) and realize that it is now autumn and even the most privileged can't own time.

I hope you like the recycling of your books.

Warmly, Felix

Kindermann, who earned his diploma in Industrial Design from HfbK (Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg) and an MFA in Visual Art from Sint-Lukas Brussels, is Visiting Professor for Mixed Media and Sculpture at LUCA School of Arts, Ghent and was a stipend at ISCP (International Studio & Curatorial Program) New York 2022-23. His work was exhibited at Z33, Hasselt (2024); Goethe-Institut New York, New York (2023); Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton (2023); Simultanhalle and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2021); KANAL - Centre Pompidou, Brussels (2020); S.M.A.K. - Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2019); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle (2019); Fondation CAB, Brussels (2019) and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (45cbm), Baden-Baden among others.