Axel Kasseböhmer is one of the young West German painters whose works are marked by reflections on the history of art. Kasseböhmer’s medium is painting; his stylistic device is the quotation. Classical motifs such as figures, landscapes, and still lifes constitute his themes, but his methods are conceptual. They lead, by way of details, fragments, and homages, from existing paintings to new pictures based on pictures. A highly personal need for painting and a profound respect for preexisting works fuse on this conceptual level with a search for the relevant social basis of painting in our time. Now, with a ten-year survey of this artist’s oeuvre, the Westfälischer Kunstverein attempted to trace the development of Kasseböhmer’s concept—a rewarding enterprise, which, in a way, was brought up to the present in a complementary show of new paintings at Monika Sprüth.
The more recent still lifes, in particular, clarify Kasseböhmer’s method of varying his borrowed subjects and turning them into autonomous abstract paintings. Whether he uses details from landscapes or vases, sections from groups of buildings, the key is always meaning or loss of meaning. It enables the artist to depart from the fragments of existing paintings, and to replace those fragments in the process of painting; that is, the quotations reconstruct the method rather than the traditional content.
The exhibition at the Kunstverein takes this principle into account. By being forced, as it were, to stop thinking about the familiar and virtually forgotten in terms of a possible pictorial model, the viewer becomes an active part of the concept. He focuses on the paintings, on their colors and formats, their technique and style. Faced with a considerable number of pictures, the viewer has to deal with being confronted by a formal and stylistic wealth that recalls Mannerism. Thus, we find almost an esthetic formalism in Kasseböhmer’s highly schematic still lifes from the second half of the ’80s, with their inexhaustible plethora of variations on the vase. In contrast, an obfuscation of space marks his landscapes from the early ’80s; this is accompanied by a powerful sensualization of color and an occasional stereoscopic effect. The artist constantly expands his spectrum: idealization, schematization, realism, and abstraction, cool, broken colors, warm and full ones, large formats, as well as medium and small ones. Ultimately, recognition of a quotation functions only as a stylistic device without an accompanying proof of origin: it doesn’t matter whether it’s Picasso or Ingres. The goal of Kasseböhmer’s quest is realty a common denominator of styles and motifs.
The artist does not fully exclude content as he repeatedly tries to preserve or reevoke lost values, especially those of the landscape, as shown in his new paintings at Monika Sprüth. These landscapes are actually photographs that Kasseböhmer took and then painted over. Thus, detail, fragment, and quotation derive from reality itself, while the process of painting over the image deprives the photographically reproduced landscape of its independent pictoriality and significance. The artist’s intervention transforms the vanishing landscape, and thereby the disappearing genre of landscape painting itself, into the conceptual, illusionary space of art, of painting. Behind everything there is the thought of unity through which Kasseböhmer intends not just to maintain the familiar, the forgotten, and the threatened, but at least to try to unite them artistically and hand them down to successive generations.
—Norbert Messler
Translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel.
