Artland’s Daily Art Pick
Every day collectors at Artland share variety of artworks from around the world, both from their personal collections as well as pieces they’ve seen in a recent gallery opening or got inspired by on the web.
In this feature, we will be presenting you with the highlight of the day, the most interesting, inspiring or moving piece of art posted in the app in the last days together with name of the collector who shared it.
Check the collector’s profile in the app to see their entire collection!
About the Artist
The first thing that strikes you about Peter Krauskopf’s paintings is a metallic shimmer that lies over his canvases like a fine dew. They are non-figurative, but not strictly abstract either. Though containing no identifiable figures, his pictures evoke hallucinogenic associations: oils splurging towards the edge of the canvas (red-hot magma!), cheeky pinks and oranges (lip gloss!), cloudy colour spectrums (sunset through an urban haze!). As a result, his work exudes an ‘intense lightness’, as Fernando Castro Flórez puts it in the catalogue for this show of Krauskopf’s work as the 2015 Falkenrot Prize winner, an annual award presented by the Künstlerhaus Bethanien. But if painting is an ongoing experiment concerning the interplay of actions and decisions, then besides such lightness, might there also be a rumbling mire in these layered pictures, a smouldering scepticism?
In the 1990s, Krauskopf studied alongside Neo Rauch under Arno Rink in Leipzig. But beyond an awareness of Old Master techniques, it is hard to draw parallels with Rauch. While the latter has pursued his surreally-coded history painting with no major breaks, the mid-2000s saw a caesura in Krauskopf’s work. Following his earlier minimalist wall pieces without painterly strokes, somewhere between picture and object, he began to experiment with the layering and scraping of paint. The resulting approach is both technically sophisticated and distinctive. His use of a squeegee may recall Gerhard Richter but Krauskopf uses it less for broad sweeps and more for fine, quasi-surgical interventions. First he prepares the various gradations of colour, mixing the paints repeatedly with the squeegee before swiftly applying them to the canvas. This process creates sharp colour contrasts as well as tiny cloud-like transitions that have an almost unreal air of digital colour gradients (bringing Krauskopf closer to Sigmar Polke’s late experiments with iridescence and intense pigments). The metallic reflections mentioned above are achieved by generous use of titanium white and turpentine.
(Text via frieze.com)