NYAB Event - Hans Kotter Exhibition

Hans Kotter Exhibition

De Buck Gallery

This event has ended.

Hans Kotter was born in Muhldorf am Inn, Germany in 1966 and studied with the Art Students League in New York from 1993- 1995. He has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe.
Kotter’s work certainly references the minimalist neon sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s by artists such as Dan Flavin, and can be seen as part of the canon of exciting “light” work by contemporary artists such as Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell.
Yet Kotter’s creations oscillate between technical perfection, naturalness, artificiality and painterly appearance, creating works of art that cannot be comfortably categorized.
As critic Peter Lodermeyer describes them, “The light-flooded forms remain inexplicable, like in an abstract painting and at the same time oddly real, material and photographically precise. They seem,” he continues, “organically animated - and yet their colors are so smooth, that they maintain an air of something confusingly foreign and inapproachable”.
Kotter perpetually refracts, diffracts, and reflects the electrical light in the work and then both saturates and degrades the colors, creating infinitesimal possibilities of reacting to it as a means for peaceful and spiritual contemplation or, alternatively, tapping into an amped feeling of frenetic energy that the saturation of vivid color induces.
Kotter’s early work was inspired in part by the changing atmosphere created by sunlight waxing and waning across stained glass windows in Gothic cathedrals -- i.e. the penetration of light through transparent matter.
Yet, as Lodermeyer states, “The magic of the diaphanous certainly occupies Hans Kotter, but it should not be overlooked that the artist is also aware of the fact that today our relationship to light is deeply profane”.
Kotter’s work is wholly modern, and the use of electricity and his technical use of luminescent foils and neon tubes refer ironically to current Western metaphysics of artificial light and its use in the ever-present secular neon advertisements, headlights of cars, and streetlights that permeate our world. “Even the ugliest city can share in the profane magic of artificial light”.
The mutable and sculptural quality of Kotter’s work is also highlighted by the juxtaposition between his use of hyper-Fauvist colors -- psychedelic purples, cerulean blues etc. -- which then dim into washy luminosity creating pale transparent pastel patterns. The opacity of the colors in flux, perpetually restructures the object, divides it and gives it rhythm, creating a dialogue with both the viewer and the space in which the work is placed.
In more recent years, Kotter has expanded his oeuvre of “light boxes” and photographic work to include large-scale installations in public spaces. He also applies his technique to everyday objects fetishizing sports trophies, ping pong tables etc.
The result is ever more interesting work, which transforms the banality of these objects and spaces into ironic cathedrals imbued with an otherworldly light and watery phosphorescence.