One of Germany’s most renowned abstract artists of his generation, Ostrowski occupies a unique role within the history of abstract painting: he pulls from both minimalist painting traditions of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the late-twentieth-century urge to dismantle the medium’s heroism and beauty. Ostrowski tips painting—and us, as viewers—off-balance, making the medium dynamic, poetic and strange.

Over the past two decades, the Cologne-based artist has thus produced a body of work that revolves around the idea of reduction – an interplay between nothingness and poeticization beyond cultural and painterly codes. In his Parliament Paintings Ostrowski therefore treats the figure of the owl like he does his abstractions: as pure shape and form that coalesce through line, gesture and color.

Ostrowski’s first owl paintings date back to 2009, but he did not exhibit them until 2019. Now, five years later, Parliament combines early examples with several new works of varying scales and dispositions.

Owls are creatures endowed by humans with a long list of spiritual and symbolic attributes; they are said to be wise, melancholic, mystical, ominous. By reducing the symbolically charged owl to pure form, Ostrowski opens the canvas to unique breaches of perception and an unexpected freedom of seeing.

The ambiguity between figuration and abstraction unfolds further in the eyes of the owls, which in most cases peer outward, watching the viewer in the gallery just as they did Ostrowski in the studio. At first, it was unsettling for the artist to paint owls while simultaneously being observed by the very creatures he was painting. Motionless, their eyes look stunned, dumbstruck, void of life and pathos—not unlike those of humans in our media-saturated world, where we are also being watched.