APERTURA MADRID GALLERY WEEKEND 2022
SHADOWPIECES
8 – 11 Septiembre 2022
Shadowpieces is an exhibition of works spanning the past three years of the abstract painter Peter Krauskopf’s practice. Instead of presenting a concluded body of paintings, the artist has opted for a conscious confrontation of subjects he deals with in his oeuvre. In earlier works, dense forms and seemingly computer-generated gradients illuminate or obscure each other, manipulating a central motif of painting itself. Newer canvasses are testament to a more conceptual interrogation on the character of color and its depths: the luscious, thickly applied oil colors are successively layered, only to be unearthed again by the painter with formal precision. Peter Krauskopf’s pictorial cosmos unfolds in the tension between the virtually algorithmic control he wields over his craft and the unpredictable nature inherent in his medium.
Shadowpieces refers to the spaces of light and dark left behind by Krauskopf in his works: his technique creates fields from which light appears to seep, and others into which it seems to plunge. However, the title does not hide the artist’s intuitive preference for the shadow as an agent. With their plasticity, Krauskopf’s paintings inescapably assign one side or the other to the space in front of them. Most of the time, the painter — and later the viewer — is cast into a position from which the light appears to emanate from beyond the canvas.
Peter Krauskopf’s works are abstract, but the non-figurative is constantly fed by the artist’s everyday experiences. Through painting, his intuitions return to reality as genuine images. To complicate the frontier between abstraction and fiction is an intentional choice in this process of reconstruction. The same holds true for the short texts, which accompany certain works in the exhibition and relate personal experiences. The accounts of the situations are clearly his, but did they really occur the way he describes them? Instead of trying to explain the paintings, the texts pose a question. A question about the realness of storytelling, and the realness of the storyteller; a question about the realness of painting, and the realness of the painter.
Leave A Comment