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until 22.04. | #3846ARTatBerlin | Galerie Schindler in Potsdam presents from 27. April 2023 the exhibition Tiefe Tage (> Deep Days) of the artist Kathrin Rank.
Rank’s painting consists of the greatest possible contrasts, such as form and dissolution, as pictorial means of design that constantly interact and thus produce themselves.
This, by the way, a constituting element of nature itself as “becoming” and “passing away”.
Strictly speaking, the one can only exist through the other, the eternal with the ephemeral, and thereby obtains the stability of expression, the minor tone, so to speak, that weaves through Kathrin Rank’s work.
Her landscape depictions do not recreate paradisiacal states of nature, but are energetic situations interwoven with life in which moments are staged, which are fleeting.
Dritter Versuch das Meer anzuzünden, (Distichon ), 170 x 280 cm, Öl auf Leinwand, 2021
All symbols of dissolution and transitions from one state to another. Water, fire, snow, clouds – all signs of volatility.
Wave crests and cloud mountains are only blinks of the moment in the depth of time.
Conscious of the great landscape painters, the painter seeks to preserve the landscape as a motif and to renew the landscape painting out of its tradition. That is, through a deliberate shift of emphasis from outdoor representation (of the classical landscape painting) to the explosiveness of the fleeting moment. Thereby the viewer is animated to behave quite differently towards the pictures of Kathrin Rank. He becomes part of this energetic process – of becoming and passing away.
Blickwispern, 60 x 80 cm, Öl auf Leinwand, 2023
The performative of expression takes the place of the contemplation of classical landscape painting. The captured moment provides information about the before and the possible to come. Painting made tangible, through the act of painting itself, through the temperament of the painter.
Layer by layer of paint, she lets the viewer of her paintings participate in the emergence of the captured moment. Dissolving and form emphasized work hand in hand, so to speak. The landscape image thus becomes a truly sensual and sensuous experience for the viewer of her paintings.
Rank’s depiction of figures takes scale in the landscape that wants the vast, the immeasurable, the enigmatic and mysterious. We look at the figures, which in turn look at the landscape or have something to create in the landscape. The perfect moment is sought.
The painterly open, fleeting is held gravitationally by the figure, which is exposed to the wildness of the brushwork that wants to represent water or snow. The human figure in an energetic field of color.
Kathrin Rank expands the realism of classical landscape depictions with regard to a self-significant, open painting, which not only landscape as a motif, but paints itself as a landscape.
Stilles Gründeln, 115 x 135 cm, Öl auf Leinwand, 2022
This painting cannot merely recreate a moment of depiction, it must itself become the moment, only then does painting come into direct contact with the world.
Not as an image, but as an action.
Fundamental seems to me in the painting Kathrin Rank that it is not about transfer of something that she wants to express, but that what is expressed arises from itself. Only then can it come alive for the painted image.
It must not exist beforehand, but must emerge in the moment, in the instant that we see it.
Her art consists in making such a moment experienceable.
The staged perfect moment in Kathrin Rank’s paintings goes beyond the majestically carried romantic experience of nature.
Aware of this fleetingness, the pictures want to be eternal in every respect.
Opening: Thursday, April 27, 2023, from 6:00 pm
Exhibition Dates: Thursday, April 27 – Saturday, June 17, 2023
To the Gallery
Image caption: Kathrin Rank, Tiefe Tage, 150 x 150cm, Öl auf Leinwand, 2022
Exhibition Kathrin Rank – Galerie Schindler | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Potsdam Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
