Painter · 1952 Herne – 2017 Munich
He painted the subjects painting was meant to be finished with – the still life, the tree, the sea, the lake beneath the mountains – and asked each time what a picture could still do.
Four decades of painting against the grain of its time.
Axel Kasseböhmer came of age as a painter in Düsseldorf in the 1970s and became a central figure of the Cologne art scene of the 1980s. While many of his contemporaries turned to loud, gestural expression, he chose the quieter and more difficult path: a conceptual painting that took up genres long considered exhausted and tested them with precision, patience and wit.
His method was repetition. A detail borrowed from an Old Master, a row of trees, a horizon line over water – he returned to the same few motifs again and again, changing colour, paint consistency and technique from canvas to canvas. What looks like a simple landscape is always also a question about how pictures are made and how we look at them.
From 2001 until his death in 2017 he taught painting as a professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. His last body of work, painted at the Walchensee in Upper Bavaria, became a summation of everything that had come before.
1979 – 2012
1979 – 1987
In his early canvases Kasseböhmer lifts a single passage out of an Old Master painting – a fold of drapery from Fra Angelico, an object from van Eyck, Zurbarán or Poussin – and enlarges it until it stands on its own. Cut loose from its story, the fragment turns into a picture about seeing. The still lifes of the mid-1980s, among them Stilleben mit Stierschädel (1985), carry this dialogue with art history into a genre of their own.
1980s – 1990s
Trees, open country and townscapes, set down in oil paint thinned until it flows and pools almost like watercolour. In series such as Landschaft gelb, grün and Landschaft grau, grün (1993 onwards) he limits himself to two colours and a handful of forms, then lets each canvas find its own answer. Leaving behind the quotation of his early years, the paintings now draw on nothing but paint itself.
1999 – 2000
The seascapes reduce the picture to its most elementary division: water below, sky above, a single line between them. Within that seemingly simple scheme Kasseböhmer explores transparency, surface and light – groundwork for the lake paintings that would follow a decade later.
The last series · 2010 – 2012
One lake, one view, one hundred canvases of 33 × 50 cm each – painted after a long illness, as his final body of work.
The Walchensee in the Bavarian Alps has a place in the history of painting: a century earlier, Lovis Corinth painted the lake again and again from his summer house in Urfeld. Kasseböhmer worked close to the same spot. Each picture follows the same fixed order – a band of sky, a band of mountains, a band of water – and within that frame he tried everything.
Thick impasto stands beside thin washes; dots, drips and grids appear; combs and floor coverings are pulled through the wet paint. Echoes of Corinth, Turner, Matisse and Munch surface and dissolve. Kasseböhmer accepted the failed picture as part of the series just as much as the successful one, so that the hundred canvases read as a single, open-ended inquiry into what a landscape painting can be today.
The series was first shown as 100 x Walchensee at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, from October 2013 to January 2014, and again in the gallery's 2018 exhibition following his death.
The estate of Axel Kasseböhmer cares for his work, archive and legacy. For research enquiries, image requests and questions about the catalogue of works, please get in touch.
Gallery representation
Sprüth Magers
Axel Kasseböhmer has been represented by Monika Sprüth since 1984. For sales and availability of works, please contact the gallery.
spruethmagers.com