Ausstellungsliste nach Galerien
 Ausstellungsliste nach Künstlern

Kamil Kukla

Mass Extinction

  KNOLL GALERIE
 221.04. - 04.06.2016

 

Vernissage: am Mittwoch, dem 20. April 2016, um 19:00 Uhr  


Erste Einzelausstellung Kamil Kuklas (*1989, Krakau) in unserer Galerie.
Eröffnung mit live Soundperformance des Künstlers und Intervention von Iris Julian.

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Kamil Kukla, wt. oil on panel, 2014, 80x130 cm, courtesy: Knoll Galerie Wien

Kamil Kukla’s succinct abstract works can be named classical painting. Painting that opposes its own over decades newly compiled obituary, a young and vivid existence of the genre. Something is coming back in Kukla’s works which often was missed or even avoided in painting of the younger generation: a fresh and ambitious involvement with the techniques and genres of the old masters.

Kamil Kukla realises his paintings based on the parameters of the classical panel painting: composition, light, colours, surface, shapes, form, lines. He combines freely fine and scrawly brush strokes with voluminous dark-bright bodies of color and single passages with dynamic color gradients, which whiz like volatile insects over the painting leaving their traces. The backgrounds are mostly monochrom or show smooth color gradients. Kukla’s abstract color-and-shape-conglomerates float in an undefined space, similar to the known Dutch still lifes which e.g. show a segment of a table or a room without further detailed location. Repeatedly the viewer believes to grasp something specific in Kukla’s paintings - wild vegetation, fragments of animal bodies, baroque nudes, strange deep-water organisms, bubbling geysers or unknown flora. In Kukla’s works quiet and contemplation never dominate because the viewer isn’t able to perceive one center of action. The viewer's attention is being chased over the painting, from carefully modeled bodies of colour to abstract, gestural brush strokes, into the depths of a color gradient and back again towards fragments of organic life which one believes to see. Kukla conducts all elements by drawing on old masters techniques and expressions of abstract painting which he combines. His visual language shows an invigorating approach on the possibilities of abstract painting today.

Kamil Kukla’s works in the exhibition titled „Mass Extinction“ originate from the artists high interest in biological processes. Complex mechanisms that the human being tries to explain and illustrate, whereas often an abstracting description or depiction is used as a mediating tool. Evolution and demise of diverse species, forms of life from different geological eras, the impressive diversity of life and its context-specific depiction or ones own subjective positioning within our surrounding macro- and microcosms - this are some of the topics that Kamil Kukla concentrates in his paintings. During the various geological eras of the planet, environment faced stages with exploding life and stages with the extinction of whole species. What offers the Anthropocene? Painting in any case; and music - as Kamil Kukla’s self-composed, spheric sounds show.

text: Ulrike Payerhofer

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Kamil Kukla, wt, oil on canvas, 2015, 140x120 cm, courtesy: Knoll Galerie Wien