# Axel Kasseböhmer Painter · 1952 Herne – 2017 Munich [Works](https://kasseboehmer.com/#works) · [Walchensee](https://kasseboehmer.com/#walchensee) · [Vita](https://kasseboehmer.com/#vita) · [Exhibitions](https://kasseboehmer.com/#exhibitions) · [Estate](https://kasseboehmer.com/#estate) 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. ![Walchensee painting: a white sky with blue-green clouds above a deep blue mountain ridge, a dark shore lit yellow at the left, and a white lake with blue and turquoise reflections](https://kasseboehmer.com/images/walchensee-024-800.jpg) From the series *100 × Walchensee*, 2010 – 2012. Oil on canvas, 33 × 50 cm 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. ## Works 1979 – 2012 ### Borrowed details & still lifes 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. ![Still life with a bull's skull: the skull and its long curved horns in angular planes of pale blue-grey and white with dark outlines, before a dark brown window frame and deep red walls](https://kasseboehmer.com/images/still-life-bull-skull-111-800.jpg) *Stilleben mit Stierschädel*, 1985 ### Landscapes & city views 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. ![Three dark green trees with drooping, ragged crowns against a flat, bright yellow ground](https://kasseboehmer.com/images/trees-yellow-076-800.jpg) ### Meereslandschaften 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. ![Seascape: a blue sea in thick, swirling brushstrokes below an ochre sky covered with a regular grid of pale blue squares](https://kasseboehmer.com/images/seascape-080-800.jpg) From the series *Meereslandschaften*, 1999 – 2000 ## 100 × Walchensee 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. ![Walchensee painting: a pale blue sky with a bank of finely gridded white clouds, a dark blue band of mountains, and a light blue lake drawn in wavy blue lines](https://kasseboehmer.com/images/walchensee-018-800.jpg) From the series *100 × Walchensee*. Oil on canvas, 33 × 50 cm ![Walchensee painting at night: a full white moon in a black sky, a white band of light along the far shore, and the moon reflected in dark blue water](https://kasseboehmer.com/images/walchensee-021-800.jpg) From the series *100 × Walchensee*. Oil on canvas, 33 × 50 cm 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. ## Vita - **1952**: Born in Herne, Westphalia - **1970s**: Studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter are among his teachers - **1982**: First gallery exhibition, Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich - **1984**: Begins his lifelong collaboration with Monika Sprüth in Cologne; takes part in *Von hier aus – Zwei Monate neue deutsche Kunst in Düsseldorf* - **1989 – 1998**: Institutional exhibitions at the Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster, the Kunstverein München and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt - **2001**: Appointed Professor of Painting at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich, where he teaches until 2017 - **2010**: Begins the Walchensee series in Upper Bavaria - **2013**: *100 x Walchensee*, Sprüth Magers, Berlin - **2017**: Dies on 9 September in Munich, aged 65 - **2018**: Memorial exhibition at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, spanning his work from 1981 to the Walchensee paintings ## Exhibitions ### Selected solo exhibitions - **2018**: Sprüth Magers, Berlin - **2014**: Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren - **2013 – 14**: *100 x Walchensee*, Sprüth Magers, Berlin - **2008**: *Neue Arbeiten*, Sprüth Magers, Munich - **1999 – 2000**: *Meereslandschaften*, Sprüth Magers, Cologne - **1998**: Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main - **1994**: Galerie Nelson, Paris - **1991**: Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Frankfurt am Main - **1990**: Kunstverein München, Munich - **1989**: Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster - **1987**: *Stilleben 1986–87*, Galerie Monika Sprüth, Cologne - **1984**: *Bilder*, Galerie Monika Sprüth, Cologne - **1983**: Galerie Arno Kohnen, Düsseldorf - **1982**: Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich ### Selected group exhibitions - **2006**: *Accrochage: Zeichnungen*, Sprüth Magers, Cologne - **2004**: *Malerei*, Sprüth Magers, Munich - **2003**: *Shadow and Light*, Salzburg - **2003**: *20th Anniversary Show*, Sprüth Magers, Cologne - **1995 – 96**: *Malerei I*, Sprüth Magers, Cologne - **1992**: *Lying on the top of a Building …*, Galerie Monika Sprüth, Cologne - **1988**: *Das Licht von der anderen Seite – Teil I: Malerei*, Galerie Monika Sprüth, Cologne - **1984**: *Von hier aus – Zwei Monate neue deutsche Kunst in Düsseldorf*, Düsseldorf ### Public collections - The Museum of Modern Art, New York - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main - Museum Folkwang, Essen - Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn - Kunsthaus NRW, Kornelimünster - Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt am Main ## Estate 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](https://spruethmagers.com/artists/axel-kassebohmer/) --- © Estate of Axel Kasseböhmer. All images courtesy of the estate. [Imprint](https://kasseboehmer.com/imprint) [Privacy](https://kasseboehmer.com/privacy) This is the Markdown version of https://kasseboehmer.com/, made from the same source. Please cite the page.