AMSTERDAM.- Galerie Fons Welters opened Sven Kroner’s seventh solo exhibition in the gallery: In the Studio.
Simultaneously natural and unreal are the compositions in Kroner's paintings. His characteristic landscapes have changed in recent years: through the open windows and colourful greenhouses, the painter has moved on to the interior landscape in which the studio has become the subject. Within a striking play of lines of window frames, floorboards, light surfaces and shadows, "wonderful mise-en-scènes, [..] remarkable images appear in the ambiguous idiom of realism, which is then not completely to be trusted. They are bizarre paintings.” writes Rudi Fuchs in Kroner's new monograph.
In Sven Kroner's recent work, the landscape has entered the inner world: it grows from the floor and the walls of the studio onto the canvas. More explicitly - and not rarely with humour - he also illustrates the artificialness that is enclosed in his work. Amid nascent paintings, the houses and ships from earlier landscapes now appear as models in so-called atelierecken, where they came from (before they were painted). With these representations of the studio, Kroner reflects unequivocally on the painting as medium, emphasizing that each image is a construction, an invention by the artist. Thus, the studio space in Selbst as Zimmer (2016) becomes a spacious self-portrait, which houses countless thoughts. In this front room, under the temporality of in shining sunlight, there is an endless flow of possibilities, in the form of paintings leaning against each other and triangular shapes spread out on the floor.
Light plays an important role in In the Studio. Particularly surrealistic is the light source in the mysterious Im Aquarium (2017). A dark space resembling a study room is illuminated by the lights from an aquarium, while we see the glare of street lights through the window. There are further details to be distinguished, including a silly toy elephant, a catalogue of the painter Wols and a book about mushrooms. Do these objects have a symbolic meaning, or were they actually in the setting of the painter? As usual, Kroner makes you smile and puts you in doubt. Despite of the enigmatic atmosphere, is this image perhaps just very ordinary?
When you look closely, beyond the figurative, the acrylic paint in itself sets constantly every painting in motion. "In his way of painting, we see Sven Kroner’s exceptional sensitivity to the numerous brush movements and their visual effects. He uses them like a light-fingered pianist unfolds and tingles melodies. In his paintings, on top of the stably ordered basic form from which they began, still lies this web like a sheer veil of inimitable paint movements. As a result, the painted surface shimmers. " (Rudi Fuchs)
Sven Kroner (Kempten, DE, 1973) lives and works in Düsseldorf. Kroner has studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1994 – 2000) under professor Dieter Krieg and was a guest lecturer at the Bauhaus University Weimar from 2012 until 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include a.o.: Overbeck-Gesellschaft, Lübeck (DE); Stedelijk Museum Kampen, Kampen (NL); Galerie Jochen Hempel, Berlin (DE); Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam (NL); Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris (FR). A selection of recent group shows includes among others ‘Perfect World’, Kunsthaus Kaufbeuren (DE); ‘Krachtwerken’, Gemeentemuseum Helmond (NL); ‘The Hidden Picture’, ING Art Collection, COBRA Museum, Amstelveen (NL); ‘Wahrheiten, zeitgenössische Kunst im Dialog mit alten Meistern, Bayer Kulturhaus, Leverkusen (DE); ‘Schone Landschaft/Bedrohte Natur’, Kunsthalle Dominikanerkirche, Osnabrück (DE); ‘For the Sake of Paint 2’.
