Sven Kroner
Untitled
Galerie Fons Welters - Back Space
15 Apr – 13 May 2000
LEARN MORE
From April 15th until May 13th, Galerie Fons Welters presents the first solo gallery show in the Netherlands of the young German artist Sven Kroner.
Scattered amidst a countryside exploding with streams of colour Sven Kroner (1973) paints young people who sit around listening to music or hang around drinking beer, couples who lounge around soaking up rays or solitary individuals who lie around in lush landscapes. On his large format canvases you see cars, red or blue ones, parked on bright green grass next to groups of people on white towels; a lonely man in his underwear lying face up on a hill in a forest at dusk; a man sprawled outside a barn, its door is open and a bicycle leans against the front, pine trees litter the setting.
Why?
There's something mysterious about the scenes, about these recurring figures and their choice in outdoor places of rest; about their consistent manner of lying motionless and the severity in which they are depicted. It is as if the episodes are someone's memories: condensed glimpses of passed stories.
Kroner has painted these pictures with acrylics but one could swear it was water color, in daring strokes which barely cover the surface, at times even leaving parts of the canvas bear. He blows up relatively banal situations in such earnest that they become convincingly dramatic, almost appealing to traditional (classical) subject matter. With an in-your-face perspective - action takes place in the forefront, the whole is exaggeratedly foreshortened - and an insolent repetition of blunt imagery he investigates painterly questions. And comes up with new answers.
Sven Kroner's paintings are big, bold, expressive works full of imagery pointing to now, to our present day, with cars and beer crates and trees demanding the same amount of reflection as figures. They all scream equally for attention yet somehow remain locked in their own absorption, posed but oblivious to the beholder.
Maxine Kopsa