The focus is on people.

More precisely: the entirety of being human, with a focus on challenges and inadequacies in (inter)personal or even political discourse. Subtle and yet brutally direct. In such impressive and energetic painterly compositions that interpretations, memories and concern were immediately triggered in me. Anxiety and melancholy were followed by acceptance, compassion and many other feelings - a (symbolic) image of human existence.

TONY CRAGG

Tony Cragg is a British sculptor who is known for using unconventional materials. In addition to wood, stone and stainless steel, he also uses plastic, fiberglass and Kevlar, which sets him apart from contemporaries such as Richard Wentworth, Richard Deacon and Anthony Gormley. Cragg's sculptures are characterized by their undulating, figurative structure. They develop a kind of paused dynamic, pausing in the middle of the movement, which results in swirling abstractions.

Born on April 9, 1949 under the name Anthony Douglas Cragg in Liverpool, Cragg moved to Wuppertal in the 1970s, where he continues to live and work. The artist taught at the Düsseldorf Art Academy until 2014, of which he was rector from 2009 to 2013. In 1988 he was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize, an art prize named after the British painter William Turner for artists who are younger than 50 years old. He received the British Order of Merit, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, in 2002.

KLAUS PRIOR

Klaus Prior was born in Wesel on the Lower Rhine in 1945. He left Germany at the age of 18 and settled in eastern Switzerland.

In 1967 he began studying painting at the St. Gallen School of Applied Arts. Three years later he moved to Ticino as a freelance artist. Klaus Prior deals with wood carving, iron casting and painting. He lives and works in Ticino and in the West Allgäu.

Klaus Prior's art, his sculptures as well as his works on canvas and paper are created without a previous sketch, without a model, depending on the size often in one step, spontaneously and concentratedly at the same time.

The current state of mind is visualized in a form of psychological automatism. The pictures reflect raw, intuitive feelings.

With spontaneously chosen colors, impulsive gestures and quickly thrown brushstrokes, the artist outlines the silhouettes of his motifs out of an inner necessity.
In the offensive outbursts beyond the boundaries of form, in the proportional overemphasis of heads, limbs, faces or gestures, in all those idiosyncratic stylistic devices, the unconcealed traces of work live on as manifestos of the momentary expression.

In terms of sculpture, he works mainly in wood, one of the oldest materials used in artistic work (his iron sculptures are also casts of wooden sculptures).

Klaus Prior avoids positioning his figures in an episodic context, adding attributes, everyday objects or other references to a narrative context.

ERIC DECASTRO

In 2024, Eric Decastro is now one of the top 5000 artists worldwide (in the Artfacts.net ranking).
Born in Burgundy/France in 1960, he grew up in a family of artists and entrepreneurs. He is a graduate of Prof. Markus Lüpertz's master class at the Kolbermoor Art Academy.

His works are in numerous important collections, such as the Deutsche Bank / SAL-Oppenheim, Reinhold Würth Collection Künzelsau, Eduardo Hochschild Collection Lima Peru, Inca-Cola Collection Peru/Atlanta USA, Reinhard Ernst Museum Wiesbaden and many more.
Eric Decastro exhibits worldwide and is represented in important galleries in Paris / Aix en Provence / Zurich / Munich / Frankfurt am Main Königstein ts / Sag-Harbor USA / Mexico City / Lima / Ulsan Korea

Convincing, immediately visible - Eric Decastro's works magically draw the viewer into a color-poetic, stirring or reduced, clear, exclusive cosmos. Paintings that the artist, despite their sometimes exuberant abundance of form and color, often masters with his pictorial harmony in a meditative state with repetitive gestures. Decastro deals with transience and very often paints over his canvases for this purpose.

Eric Decastro lives and works in the greater Frankfurt am Main area and near Lourmarin, Luberon / France

HENRI DEPARADE

In the exhibition business of contemporary painting, one rarely encounters such a consistently consistent, interwoven appearance of a work as that of the Dresden artist Henri Deparade. In every single one of the works presented here, without exception, you can clearly decide between the representational levels of color surface, figure drawing and the decomposition of movement of bodies and faces. This painting is epic, lyrical and dramatic at the same time; it is both highly dynamic and remains frozen in movement.

It radiates statements that seem to take place in a closed system and yet could mean open statements in their structures, which convey themselves to the same and so paradoxical extent as they are mysteriously encoded. This painting first communicates itself to the viewer, and does so very strongly and clearly, because it is mainly about people communicating with each other - their affections and conflicts - and yet it ultimately eludes them. It is strikingly simple and profoundly complex.

We all know from our historical image memory the image structure of the transparency of Henri Deparade's figures in the outline drawings, usually on a single-coloured background, which is so characteristic of him: I mean the chalk designs on Toulouse-Lautrec's cardboards, such as the "Woman pulling up her stockings", such as "Yvette Guilbert" and "Chocolat dancing in the bar" - where transparency is created by the background and body colour forming a consistent unity. In contrast, Deparade introduces a further dimension with his impressively complex network of lines, a way of representation that is downright cinematographic: the rhythmic breakdown of the movement of a body or face into staggered images would appear to the eye as continuous movement - offset at the speed of their image carriers. Deparade does use such a media analysis method, but does not transform it into an illusion in his art.

The choreographies of his dialogic figures are possible movements. It is the viewer who sets them in motion. But he can also leave it. In this way, the artist achieves a state of representation and reflection that goes far beyond the development of film history from the circus of fairs, and actually goes back to strict experimentation.

How can an identity between unambiguity and ambiguity, which psychoanalysis has been concerned with since Sigmund Freud, be represented? How can Egon Schiele's postulate "I am the many" be taken up pictorially and with means other than those of introverted extroversion, as in Schiele's case?

The Viennese painter Heinz Stangl, who reached his full potential early and died too early, introduced the trick of multiplying the limbs of his figures into contemporary art history, thereby dynamizing, eroticizing and enigmaticizing his pictorial inventions. But after he took part in the legendary exhibition "Back to the Figure" in the Hypo-Kunsthalle Munich in the summer of 2006, there was no painter after his death who continued the path he had shown contemporary painting.




MARKUS LÜPERTZ

Markus Lüpertz, born in 1941 in Reichenberg in Bohemia, is known as an eccentric painter. However, he has received international recognition for his artistic work. In his extensive oeuvre, representational and abstract phases alternate.

In the 1960s and 1970s, he created his "dithyrambic" works, whose stylistic feature e are primarily pathos, theatricality and classicizing components. Especially in the 1980s, Lüpertz paraphrased works by the classicist Nicolas Poussin. Another new phase of his work can be seen in the 1990s. The Bible and legends are now the subject not only in paintings but also in sculpture. Here he is concerned with elementary human emotions such as loneliness or failure.