Peter Krauskopf. Landscape with abstract painting

text1

Alongside works from our own collection, this »Schaukabinett« exhibition also presents new paintings by Peter Krauskopf. The key work on show is the monumental high-format Seestück (Seapiece,2011), which has now entered the collection of the New Masters.

In the foreground of this unfolding composition there is a notional natural landscape as depicted by the Baroque or Romanticism. A painterly reminiscence of a landscape, or a sense of the natural world, as citations of pictorial images from these past epochs, plays an important role in Krauskopf’s paintings, which are made up of several overlapping layers. The canvas is grounded in glue, upon which the painter applies a reddish imprint as a colour ground, which, however, remains largely invisible to the viewer except for a few traces on the edges of the canvas. Further layers are applied with a squeegee – a grey pigment,mixed with indigo and ruby red. The product is a monochrome surface, which is then in turn dominated by a green insert.

Krauskopf’s turn to open, freer landscapes with geometrical points of reference began around 2006. After his reductionist »strip paintings«, No. 89/06 (2006) saw the austere structure of the composition dissolve. On a monochrome surface there is a spatial intervention – similar to Seestück – that represents a building in an open horizon.

Peter Krauskopf’s newest paintings expand non-figurative colour field painting by using the European topos of »landscape and romanticism«. Krauskopf takes a new approach to this combination, making it visible to the viewer. Abstract and figurative approaches are not mutually exclusive, and associations based on realistic experiences of seeing are expressly permitted.

The special exhibition divided | undivided. Art in Germany 1945 to 2010 also includes early works by Peter Krauskopf.