In her grid paintings, Petra Kasten pushes the play of layers to infinity. On large-format canvases, she abandons the realm of the representational once and for all and creates overlapping networks of vertical, horizontal and intersecting lines that allow the viewer to penetrate layer by layer into uncanny depths. Or not: in some paintings, the viewer's gaze is thrown back from the uppermost grid, leaving what lies behind almost inaccessible. On other canvases, the first layers seem to blur into a veil, a membrane that turns the infinity behind it into something uncertain. For Petra Kasten, the idea of the structure of matter always remains a search, a circling around a riddle that will probably never be definitively solved. Perhaps this is precisely the appeal of her work.
"To approach the work of Petra Kasten means to deal with the question of the self-organised whole - to familiarise oneself with the structures that are omnipresent in the artist's world view:
'If all the ordered, scattered and tangled lines of our surroundings were dark strokes, wouldn't the atmosphere appear almost black to us?" (Petra Kasten)"
- EMILIA KRELLMANN -
As a festive opening of the exhibition was not possible, a finissage was held on Saturday, 26 September from 3 pm. Matthias Flügge spoke at the event.
