Gotthard Graubner - Painting
20 Sep - 01 Nov 2008
The Galerie Karsten Greve dedicates its upcoming exhibition to the German artist Gotthard Graubner. The exhibition includes recent works as mostly large-scale colour space bodies as well as works on paper.
In the continuous line with his colour spaces of the 1950s and his colour cushions and colour bodies of the early 1960s, Gotthard Graubner developed his so-called colour space bodies with the beginning 1970s. The artist himself titled his works this way exceeding the two-dimensional bounds of conventional painting. Canvas or nylon is stretched like skin over foam material or synthetic cotton wool creating organic, body shaped forms. They unfold three-dimensional qualities and appear almost sculptural in their corporality.
Colour has always been the central subject of Gotthard Graubner's work. Colour stands for itself revealing its specific life and expression. Usually, Graubner focuses just one 'range of colour', its manifold nuances interact with one another - in tension as well as in balance and harmony. Colour is able to unfold a tremendous diversity. It is applied in numerous layers; it runs, blurs, covers, overlaps, disguises and orbits. It percolates and saturates the material, melts into it.
The painterly volume is due to the process of repeated saturation and glazing of the tightened material allowing an intensified breathing of the colour, additionally increased by simultaneous contrasts to 'pictorial organism'.
Alongside to Gotthard Graubner's paintings his work on paper represents a stand-alone category as an equal way of expression since 1956. Again, colour remains the central subject. However, Graubner's works on paper are subdued to analogical processes through the absorptive capacity of paper.
Gotthard Graubner has been born in 1930 in Erlbach (Vogtland). Due to numerous solo and group exhibitions he gained major national as well as international recognition. He participated in documenta 4 and 6. Furthermore, he represented Germany on Venice Biennial in 1982. His works belong to well-known public and private collections. (The Kunsthalle Karlsruhe is currently presenting Graubner's entire graphic work).
Gotthard Graubner lives and works in Düsseldorf, Berlin and on Museum Insel Hombroich.
In the continuous line with his colour spaces of the 1950s and his colour cushions and colour bodies of the early 1960s, Gotthard Graubner developed his so-called colour space bodies with the beginning 1970s. The artist himself titled his works this way exceeding the two-dimensional bounds of conventional painting. Canvas or nylon is stretched like skin over foam material or synthetic cotton wool creating organic, body shaped forms. They unfold three-dimensional qualities and appear almost sculptural in their corporality.
Colour has always been the central subject of Gotthard Graubner's work. Colour stands for itself revealing its specific life and expression. Usually, Graubner focuses just one 'range of colour', its manifold nuances interact with one another - in tension as well as in balance and harmony. Colour is able to unfold a tremendous diversity. It is applied in numerous layers; it runs, blurs, covers, overlaps, disguises and orbits. It percolates and saturates the material, melts into it.
The painterly volume is due to the process of repeated saturation and glazing of the tightened material allowing an intensified breathing of the colour, additionally increased by simultaneous contrasts to 'pictorial organism'.
Alongside to Gotthard Graubner's paintings his work on paper represents a stand-alone category as an equal way of expression since 1956. Again, colour remains the central subject. However, Graubner's works on paper are subdued to analogical processes through the absorptive capacity of paper.
Gotthard Graubner has been born in 1930 in Erlbach (Vogtland). Due to numerous solo and group exhibitions he gained major national as well as international recognition. He participated in documenta 4 and 6. Furthermore, he represented Germany on Venice Biennial in 1982. His works belong to well-known public and private collections. (The Kunsthalle Karlsruhe is currently presenting Graubner's entire graphic work).
Gotthard Graubner lives and works in Düsseldorf, Berlin and on Museum Insel Hombroich.