Sven Kroner
Winterlong

Dec 13th, 2008 – Jan 10th, 2009
Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf

The generously fluent acrylic paint is applied to large-sized canvases with a fast, sovereign stroke of the brush and a natural virtuosity. Without a doubt, Kroners landscape panoramas are reminiscent of the clouded sky of a Jacob van Ruisdael and the horizons of a Franz Post, whereas his back view with contemplative ocean view has its reference to the German romanticism. The array to the German figurative painting with its new romantic tendencies is spanned almost reflex like – definitely to Peter Doig. It seems as if you could flee from the city with Sven Kroner very well and stroll through the history of art… With a sharpened view on panoramas one finds out that Kroner’s tableau have by far more to do with our own everyday life than with contemplative monks at the sea.

They show people swimming in a quarry lake, skiers in the Alps, weekenders on frozen forest lakes and children building snowmen in their front garden. The landscape serves as a coulisse for the everyday leisure activities of the average middle European. Kroner paints the traces that the human civilization is leaving in the nature by naturally inhabiting, consuming or just enjoying it. Cabins at the roadside, a car wreck in the coppice, carved messages in the tree trunk, snowmen, footprints, motorways, storm damage and avalanches.
The landscape appears contemporary, peopled by a quite carefree consumer society that walks, camps, chills or barbecues.
The artist combines different perspectives, close up and low angle view combined with a skilful illumination, in a way that they appear familiar. Absurd as it may seem the phenomena of nature are most suitable for the lies of painting. Pastose white acrylic mounts become melting snow and also the reflections in water and the dusk are good for delusion. It is no surprise that also those crop circles that caused world wide speculations, appear with Kroner, as if Polkes higher creatures had left their traces once again.
Grown up in the Allgaeu Sven Kroner favours the scenery of the mountains of his own childhood as inspiration and every now and then he uses photographs of the once visited places as a guideline.
Therefore his landscapes also serve him as a projection surface for his own longings in everyday life, the nostalgic retrospect of a father of a family on his own youth in which one used to sit together on beer cases in the woods or at the campfire. Alongside are equal pictures of the present that report on playing kids in front gardens and holidays with Greek sunsets. Kroner also deals with old paintings years later and therefore makes his own art production part of his history. With an irony that is just as distant from youthful rebellion as from old-fashioned cynicism the artist turns himself into a contemporary witness of a generation that makes fun of its own conservatism with a reflective wink.

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