Lilly Wei interviews painter David Ostrowski on the occasion of his exhibition Emotional Paintings at Peres Projects, Berlin, on view through June 21, 2014.

In her introduction to the interview, Wei writes that Ostrowski's paintings "look like works that may or may not be quite finished, seemingly nonchalant studies that by happenstance back up into a delicate, even elegant, if imperfect, unfamiliar beauty. It is an attitude based on contingency and mutability and framed by ambivalence, as Ostrowski muses on what might constitute a painting today, what might be discarded or refused… Dragged across the floor, scuffed, otherwise marked, bullied, even, [the paintings] are remarkably intimate in presence, reverberating with cryptic revelations that might seem throwaways, but are not."