ST. MORITZ.- Galerie Karsten Greve St. Moritz presents its first exhibition dedicated to Norbert Prangenberg (1949–2012) at this location, featuring a selection of significant works from various stages of his career. Prangenberg gained international recognition in 1982 as a participant in documenta 7 in Kassel. His diverse oeuvre encompasses painting, drawing, and sculpture, reflecting his profound and evolving exploration of material, form, and color. Since the early 1980s, he devoted himself intensively to ceramics, developing a distinctive formal language that established him as one of the leading figures in contemporary German art. His works, characterized by a sensitive balance between spontaneous gesture and compositional rigor, captivate with their tactile quality and expressive intensity.


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The exhibition places a particular focus on Prangenberg’s sculptures and paintings, which stand out for their dynamic materiality and distinctive formal language. In his paintings, he employs thick, impasto layers of paint, creating relief-like textures that imbue the paintings with a sculptural presence. His small-format oil paintings impress with their powerful gestural texture and subtle color transparency. In his sculptures, Prangenberg explores the interplay of volume and structure, often drawing inspiration from archaic forms. His ceramic works feature irregularly modeled surfaces, incorporating incisions and fingerprints that lend them a unique, handcrafted character.

In addition to sculptures, the gallery presents paintings and works on paper. His color-intensive paintings captivate with their gestural texture and transparency. As a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Prangenberg influenced a new generation of artists. Today, his works are included in prestigious museum collections such as the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, as well as in major private collections.

This exhibition showcases Prangenberg’s multifaceted artistic vision and his lifelong pursuit of new expressive possibilities. It demonstrates how he pushed the boundaries between painting and sculpture, ultimately developing a unique visual language. Accompanying catalogs will be available, offering a deeper engagement with his work.

Norbert Prangenberg’s art emerges from a fundamental interaction of hand, eye and material which has manifested itself in a variety of genres – in drawings and in prints, as well as in imaginative sculptures and in his unmistakable painting style. His drawings and paintings are characterized by simple shapes like circles, diamonds, squares, ovals and triangles. Initially he worked with pastel and watercolour and only recently began working in oils. He uses the materiality of the medium through his impasto technique, which in some works lap over the edge and thus become a sculptural object. The layer created by this impasto application of oil paint is ruptured by tiny irregular cuts, revealing parts of the underlying canvas. In other pieces Prangenberg uses copper or zinc, which let the metal of the support shine through, thereby achieving an extraordinary translucent effect.

In the 1980s he began working on sculptures. Already outstanding due to their dimensions, the ceramic works recall the vessel as it has been used in the Mediterranean world since antiquity. Both the intense treatment of the surface and the varied use of colour give the pieces their characteristic appearance. Norbert Prangenberg was born in 1949 in Rommerskirchen-Nettesheim. During his apprenticeship as a gold and silversmith he produced his first woodcuts and drawings, beginning in 1965. Since the 1980s he has gained international renown through his participation in documenta 7 in Kassel. Starting in 1993 Norbert Prangenberg held a professorship for ceramics and glass at the Kunstakademie in Munich. Norbert Prangenberg passed away in 2012 in Krefeld.


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