From January 26th till February 26 2006 we present painting of Lukas Kramer, a German artist from Saarbrücken. These are works from the last 15 years.
The exhibition is entitled The River of Light and a Green Space.
…and these elements, among others, we can find in Kramer´s works.
The pictures, which can be interpreted as abstract, may seem not trendy, because of the modern art, as we know, both in Europe and in Poland, the depicting painting is mainly presented, most often by the artists of the young generation.
However, Kramer´s pictures, which in this trend are definitely not trendy, still have something fresh about them. Maybe it is the subject, which touches upon the modern world and civilisation, or maybe it is just their magic and timelessness?
To touch it, we have to move back a couple of years ago…
A crucial moment in his work was when he decided to get involved in the fight for human rights and environmental protection. In his works from the 1980s, criticising socialism, capital punishment, experiments on animals or nuclear weapons, we can see – next to a realistically painted human figure – dark, impenetrable spaces connected by unpleasant, flickering colours. That was the stage of defiance, political discontent, outlook observations.
This stage of his work is presented in Blackout, night pictures by Lukas Kramer, a move made in 1984, which supplements the presentation.
However, in his works of the 1990s, Kramer began to directly project the subject of existence in relation to immeasurable technical hazard, using colour and light.
His pictures still tell of the material world, its problems, but Lukas Kramer has started to depict the world of technology without a subject.
…in the beginning of the 1980s, during his stay in France, the artist, passing a construction site, took a picture of a box full of neon pipes. So he photographed light, refracted and bent by glass. This originated new works.
A cycle of paintings entitled Fluid system was created, including Rivers of light silver-and-grey shapes of pipes jostle in the background, while slightly luminous pigment illuminates the whole scene.
The next stage of his art features central motives, everything associates with electronic waste. This is the Pulsation and vibrants cycle. It is a combination of moments of vibration with pulsating, like existential helplessness.
Shiny columns, flickering pipes, sloshing waves, virtual, colourful beams of light, a gesture depicted through drops of paint.
Since the end of the 1990s Lukas Kramer experiments with different (for himself) pigments, most of all with green.
Is it possible to work with green, if it does not depict any landscape?
The artist proves it is. But Kramer green is not the nature green. It is a technical green, since all the time in his work the artist depicts the world of technology. Kramer presents green as the explanation of the point of existence changed by the world of technology, artificial, cold, imprisoned and held between darkness and light. He creates the eponymous green space.
On the pictures we will see vertical pipes which were separated from the horizontal ones, and the stripes of green in between create the effect of sheen – PIPES, which in Kramer art became an obsessively used model, the icon of the world of technology.
So Kramer’s pictures are independent works, are a symbol of human life subordinated to the conditions of the technological world, and the artist himself, as befits the artist – plays with the art in itself, experiments with the space, light and colours.
…and solving formal problems in a painting results in new questions for the artist…
When I asked Lukas Kramer, what next? he replied: try to immerse yourself in my picture of your choice, what will you feel like?
I answered: like Alice in Wonderland?… And I gave it a try.
It was worth it.
Heartily recommended.
Beata Kaźmierczak
(this text was also based on the introduction to the exhibition catalogue)
Exhibition 2006.01.26 – 2006.02.26
