In Bolzano, the first exhibition of Michael Krebber, an important contemporary German artist

From May 29, 2021 to January 8, 2022, the Antonio Dalle Nogare Foundation presents Michael Krebber ’s first solo exhibition in Italy, entitled Studiofloor and Diamond Paintings.

An internationally renowned artist and a central figure on the German art scene between the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Krebber(Cologne, 1954) has over the years become a reference point for an entire generation of younger artists, thanks to his constant research that is careful to question the conventions and boundaries of the medium of painting, understood by the artist as a space for dialogue and a zone of contamination, rather than a mode aimed at the production of an object.

Krebber has been pursuing research marked by a conceptual approach to painting for decades, based on the belief that it is not possible to invent something new in art, since everything has already been invented. Rather than “inventing something new,” Krebber’s minimal and seemingly unresolved interventions return the viewer to an open canvas full of possibilities: like an unfinished sentence, his works leave the viewer free to imagine what might happen.

Painting is understood by the artist almost as performance: his has been called a “system of hesitations in which opposing forces simultaneously encourage and hinder each other,” expanding painting beyond the conventional notion of the painting as object. Krebber’s unfinished aesthetics, however, is not the result of an attempt to sabotage the medium, but rather of a precise desire to extend the discourse beyond the canvas and the space traditionally attributed to painting. An intention that emerges with particular clarity in the two series on display in the exhibition. The series entitled studiofloor MK/P MK19/087/1-8 (2000) was presented with an enigmatic image on the cover of Artforum in 2005. For an exhibition a few years earlier Krebber borrowed a series of his own paintings from collectors, which he arranged on large tables in the center of the room. Overturning a more common notion of display, the walls, left blank (on which the paintings were to be installed) were covered with large masonite panels, portions of the artist’s studio floor, cut out and placed on the wall as if they were paintings. The replacement of more traditional painting techniques with the use of the readymade also returns in the second series shown in the exhibition.

In the fourteen canvases of Diamond Painting (2003), Krebber systematically demythologizes, as on the other hand the title of the series suggests, the centrality of subject and technique in painting, suggesting invec euno space open to suspension and incompleteness. Store-bought fabrics, decorated with pre-printed patterns, replace the traditional canvas and become the surface on which Krebber paints simple geometric shapes of white diamonds. As is often the case in his work, reference to influential German artists, in this case who have used fabric, such as Rosemarie Trockel and Sigmar Polke, reveals his deep knowledge of contemporary art history and painting.

The exhibition is produced in collaboration with Greene Naftali, New York.

With the kind support of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano, the City of Bolzano and Progress SPA.

For all information you can visit the official website of the Antonio Dalle Nogare Foundation.

In Bolzano, the first exhibition of Michael Krebber, an important contemporary German artist

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