Peter Krauskopf

Peter Krauskopf is preoccupied with the process of overpainting. All his pictures – the intensely colored, smaller works on paper and the large-format paintings on canvas in monochrome color gradients – have one thing in common: they appear abstract at first glance. Yet they are concretizations of a temporal process: on homogeneous, smooth surfaces, which consist either of sanded, multi-layered, formerly discarded images or monochrome underpaintings, the artist carries out a single, image-generating intervention. Krauskopf, who always paints with oil on linen or paper, uses a squeegee or a brush to apply a broad, even surface over a pre-existing imagination. This creates a symbiosis between an image of the past and its completion in the present. They combine his “museum of images” in his head – especially that of American color field painting of the 1960s, German Romanticism and Dutch painting of the 17th century – with the painter’s intuition in the here and now.