Martin Kasper, born in Schramberg (Germany) in 1962, lives and works in Freiburg im Breisgau. His many years of exhibitions have made him well-known in Germany and abroad, and his works are now represented in numerous international collections. Galerie Bernhard Bischoff & Partner is therefore delighted to have been working with the artist since 2018 and to present his latest paintings in the exhibition ‘Contained’. The title itself refers to what is “contained” in Martin Kasper’s perspectival spaces and how they affect us: the studio at different times of day and weather conditions, the abandoned bar or the building undergoing renovation. The rooms in modernist architecture appear rather plain, with little furniture and always devoid of people, like the backdrop to a stage. This is where painting makes its appearance: in the way the artist renders light and shadow in his own tonality and animates the rooms in a quasi-painterly way.

Martin Kasper has been working with architecture and interiors for over 20 years. They have become a field of experimentation for his own artistic positioning and recur as “spatial portraits” in his paintings. When we look at them, seemingly familiar pictorial spaces open up to us, which at the same time seem strange; abandoned and yet with traces of human habitation and use; not without melancholy and yet exhilaratingly colourful; like scenes of emotional states. Their emptiness and potential abundance turn them into free spaces for thought, releasing moments of atmospherically captivating aura and tension-filled calm.

Individual associations between imagination and reality are awakened through painterly means and the perspective depiction, which places us in the painted spaces in a manner reminiscent of a painting. Reflections and refractions of light further increase the ambiguity, the optical illusion and fiction. Sometimes Martin Kasper adds something to the rooms, sometimes he leaves something out or changes the proportions. As realistic as everything looks at first glance, it is in fact artificial and subjective. For all the pull of the pictorial spaces, we ultimately remain on the outside, like the audience in a theatre looking at the stage. Images of the artist also appear in his own pictures: As a puzzle game with the painting of what has already been painted; as an interaction of spatial images in pictorial spaces that expand each other.
The view also leads into the distance through wide window fronts, and along curved staircases with glass handrails we even encounter unfamiliar terrain. Meanwhile, Martin Kasper condenses real impressions in his pictures: from numerous journeys and details of various interiors. Based on photographs, he creates sketches for the mostly large-format paintings, but changes them continuously as he paints. As self-contained and limited to the picture plane as the views are, they nevertheless expand further and further in the imagination when viewed. Painting and its effect on the spatial illusion are decisive for this, constantly putting our imagination as well as the real world in tension in the dualism between appearance and reality.