Michael Krebber – Studiofloor and Diamond Paintings

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

Michael Krebber (b. Cologne, 1954) is an internationally acclaimed artist and a figure central to the German art scene between the 1980s and ‘90s. Over the years he has become a reference point for a generation of younger artists, thanks to his constant and attentive focus on questioning the conventions and limits of the medium of painting, which he sees as a space for dialogue and a cross-genre hotbed, rather than something focused on the production of an object. 

For decades, Krebber’s art has been distinguished by a conceptual approach to painting, based on the conviction that it is impossible to invent anything new in art, as everything has already been invented. Rather than inventing something new, Krebber’s minimal and apparently unresolved interventions present the viewer with canvases that are open and full of possibilities. Like an unfinished sentence, his works leave the viewer free to imagine what might happen. 

The painting is viewed by the artist almost as a performance. It has been defined as a system of hesitations in which opposing forces simultaneously motivate and block one another, an approach that expands painting beyond the conventional notion of the artwork as an object. 

Krebber’s incomplete aesthetic, however, is not the result of an attempt to sabotage the medium, but stems rather from an explicit desire to extend dialogue beyond the canvas and space traditionally attributed to painting. This intention emerges clearly in the two series displayed 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. In an exhibition staged several years ago, Krebber asked collectors to loan a series of his own paintings that he laid out on large tables in the centre of the room. Turning the common notion of display on its head, the walls – on which the paintings would normally have hung – were left empty and covered with large masonite panels from the artist’s floor, cut and positioned on the wall like paintings.

The second series displayed in the exhibition also replaces traditional painting techniques with a readymade approach.

In the fourteen Diamond Painting (2003) canvases, Krebber systematically demystifies, as the title of the series suggests, the centrality of subject and technique in painting by proposing a space that is open to suspension and incompleteness. So, store- purchased fabrics, decorated with pre-printed patterns, replace the traditional canvas, and become the surface on which Krebber paints simple geometrical white diamond shapes. As often happens in his work, the reference to influential German artists, in this case that have used fabric, like Rosemarie Trockel and Sigmar Polke, reveals his profound knowledge of art history and contemporary painting. La

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

Find more about the Antonio Dalle Nogare Foundation by visiting their website.