Michael Krebber (Cologne, Germany, 1954) is one of the most influential contemporary painters working today. Exploring the continual exhaustion, withdrawal, engagement and renewal of painting, the artist’s practice is deeply embedded in its history and materials, yet characterized by both an affirmation and negation of the medium.
Reflecting Krebber’s approach to painting — its expressive language as well as its critical function —, this exhibition presents a selection of close to one hundred works from the past three decades from numerous private and institutional collections across Europe and the US. The paintings, drawings and sculptures on view range from hesitations and disavowals to a variety of motifs and gestures by turns emphatic, arresting or ironic — occasionally all at the same time. Together they trace as much a line of interested conviction, as a recursive arc of starts, fits and restarts, repetitions and murmurs.
A central reference in the conversation around the medium’s continued relevance, Krebber’s work constitutes a set of responses to a problem called ‘painting’, persistent in its fascination, obdurate in its delayed resolution.