Exhibitions - Galerie von & von

SHADOWS IN THE SUN 06.04. - 24.06.2023

We encounter light and shadows everywhere, during the day or in darkness. In art, light and shadow are used as stylistic devices, they give the images their plasticity and depth, but they can also be understood as a metaphor and result in multi-layered pictorial content. At the same time, the works of the three exhibited artists show very different artistic approaches.

Leif Trenkler, whose eponymous painting SHADOWS IN THE SUN provides the exhibition title, is influenced by the painting style of the Impressionists, who painted shadows purple. HisPoollandschaften show light and shadow completely unencrypted. Casagrande & Recalcati accentuate by a skilful illumination of individual parts of the picture, here the perspective of the picture is created by light and shadow, which can also be transferred to the content of the picture. Finally, the pictures of Rayk Goetze, whose pictures vehemently elude a uniform readability. His atmospherically dense pictorial narratives are characterized by a change from glistening light to dark sections, multilayered and contradictory at the same time without any symbolic character.

The artist duo CASAGRANDE & RECALCATI, who live and work in Milan, feel connected to the tradition of still life. The flower paintings, titled Hypervanitas, take up the idea of baroque vanitas images, and their close connection with the ephemeral. The paintings are reflections on the inexorable passing of time, visualizing different stages of beauty in continuous metamorphosis. In the paintings, the artist duo skillfully celebrates beauty, materiality and transience in lush, floral compositions that, upon closer inspection, already seem to slowly wither. Here nature shows itself in morbid beauty, everything is transient and is preserved by the minute painting.

RAYK GOETZE deals in his paintings with the great themes, with motifs that are firmly anchored in the tradition of art history. Goetze is a painterly alchemist; he detaches the motif from its context and transfers it to the present. In doing so, his paintings combine old-masterly precision of color application with strong, two-dimensional color application and, with their somberly luminous colorfulness, create a special aura and tension that transfer the paintings into the present. Rayk Goetze moves between the poles of the fascination of the creative possibilities and the play with the forces, a painting from deepest conviction, which captivates by its subject matter as well as by its ambivalence and narrative depth.

LEIF TRENKLER is an important representative of New Figuration in Germany. In his works, which oscillate between realism and surrealism, he examines the effect of light and shadow on architecture, landscape and figures. In his works, there is deliberately no clear differentiation between fiction and reality: This becomes clear in the expressive, overdriven colorfulness of his pictorial worlds. Through a poetic rapture, he dissolves space and draws in an exciting, fantastic level, whose visual quality fascinates and at the same time stands for a unique signature. His pictures are snapshots, thematically dealing with childhood memories, street and nature views, everyday or party scenes, whose visual quality fascinates.