Sven Kroner
I’m just a dream
6 June–19 July 2014
Galerie Fons Welters
Bloemstraat 140
1016 LJ Amsterdam
T (+31) 20 423 30 46
mail [at] fonswelters.nl
Galerie Fons Welters is proud to invite you to Sven Kroner’s exhibition I’m just a dream. Kroner could be considered a classical landscape painter, whose landscapes of paint stem from personal experiences. In his most recent work, he literally looks at the outside world from within.
In Studio view, Lörick (2014) we stare out of the open window of Kroner’s studio. Over a flat landscape, our view is pulled directly to the high apartment building in the distance. Kroner seems to give the painterly veduta—a distant view painted from a window—a playful twist, or to refer to German Romantic painting in which the open window functioned as symbol for longing. But even more prominent than its view, he paints the window frame itself. Since the closed windowpanes are hazy, we are not quite able to focus. And thus the very interior, existing outside of the picture frame, seems to move forward.
The light painted by Kroner is clear and bright, its casted shadows so realistic, that in spite of its quick brush strokes, the painting seems to be true to life. However, doubt steps in. Where does the reflection of a house in the open window frame actually come from? Moreover, in the left corner a miniature house appears to stand inside on the windowsill, which suddenly turns the image into an indefinable moment between reality and vision. As Simone Lucas wrote in Kroner’s latest catalogue: “Sven transforms the banal into a real dream.”
In addition to the series of window-paintings, Kroner shows panoramas in which ships have somehow collided with nature. Sometimes an impending sense of doom, of something being near at hand, dominates the image, then again we behold the calm after the storm. Empty barges lie, like ruins, in flooded meadows. A ship is stranded in a rocky forest, or elsewhere still hovering in the air; what exactly is going on here? It is this moment of uncertainty and tension that is characteristic of Kroner’s work. In stormy weather, a zeppelin flies low over a grass field. “Fuji Film” prominently appears on the airship. As a provocative contrast, Kroner makes photographic realism fly away.
Sven Kroner (b. 1973, Kaufbeuren, Germany) studied at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf in Professor Dieter Krieg’s class. Recent exhibitions include: Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris; Blue Moon Sinking from the Weight of the Load, Marc Straus Gallery, New York; Past Present Future, Sies + Höke Gallery, Düsseldorf; Harvest, LVR Römermuseum Xanten / Kunstverein Xanten, Germany; The Air Was Magic When We Played, Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Like a Hurricane, Gemeente Museum Helmond, The Netherlands; and Hidden Path, Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York. Group exhibitions: Haltlose Gründe, Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany; Landschaft in schwaben heute, Schwäbische Galerie im Kloster Oberschönefeld, Gessertshausen, Germany; Kanaalwerken, Gemeentemuseum Helmond, The Netherlands; Le peintre de la vie moderne, Galerie Jochen Hempel, Leipzig.
