Martin Kasper born in Schramberg (D) in 1962 lives and works in Freiburg im Breisgau. The artist can look back on a long exhibition activity in Germany and abroad and his works are represented in many well-known international collections.

Martin Kasper has been dealing with architecture and interiors for over two decades as a painter. In a constructive way, he uses the representation of interiors as an experimental field for artistic location determinations and paints portraits of spaces. In Kasper’s spatial images, the viewer sees pictorial spaces that seem strangely familiar and thus arouse individual associations in the viewer. The painted spaces are usually deserted with a strong pull.

Through his painting, he transforms architectural spaces into scenes of emotional well-being: spaces of emptiness, intellectual freedom, moments of tense calm and atmospheres of unconventional aura emerge. By means of tricks such as reflections or refractions, the painter emphasizes the fictionality of the spatial images, which he transforms into search images and thus underlines their ambiguity. Adding something or leaving it out or manipulating the proportions, these spaces seem realistic at first glance, but on closer inspection you can see that the original architecture has been alienated to the demands of painting and the many inconspicuous shifts merge into an artificial structure through which a subjective concept of space can be seen. Just as skilful Martin Kasper illustrates the subtlety of his imagery by taking pictures of his own works in new images again. Irritating is the effect of how the painted images interact with the spaces in which they occur.

In recent years, the artist has enriched his imagery with other means of expression. He uses oil paints instead of tempera paints, which enables him to intensify the color effect. The subdued color of the pictorial spaces is mixed with strong, colorful tones. The color offensive goes hand in hand with a form offensive. Invigorating disturbances crowd into the silent theater. The picture composition is subject to a process of painterly dynamisation. The artist is about to blow up the frame. The title of the exhibition ‹Im Wechsel› refers to this phase of reorientation. Painting has become freer, it no longer wants to let it sensation dictate primarily by the atmosphere of space.

After Kasper was particularly attracted in the earlier pictures of architectural styles of the 1950s and 1960s, his painting is now developing in the same dynamic as the ever-changing appearance of urban living spaces.

The gallery Bernhard Bischoff & Partner is pleased to realize this exhibition in cooperation with the curator Maxe Sommer.