“Plants become one with the forms which they invent. (…) Creating a form means proceeding through it with one’s entire being, just as one strides through eras or phases of one’s own life. Creating something always means reshaping oneself (…) Imagining something means becoming what one imagines.” [1] 

In search of visual truth, Koberling conceives of his work as meditative thought about how form creates beauty and how beauty gives rise to form. During his annual sojourns on Iceland, where he deliberately withdraws into a hermit’s solitude, the painter immerses himself in the landscape so vividly marked by erosion. There among the rapid fulmination and atmospheric interplay of flowing air and water, amid a sunlight which imbues the mist with color, he brings the pictorial ideas which have accumulated inside him first onto paper and later onto canvas. Through the transparency of the liquefied oil paints, levels thrust themselves out of the depths onto the surface; here and there, a whirlpool seems to be stirring up the sediment underlying a body of water. In this connection between specific place and temporal occurrence, Koberling achieves the highest form of concentration. His works accordingly bear witness to both pervasive calm and extreme motility, as well as to the nature of painting itself.

[1] Emanuele Coccia, Die Wurzeln der Welt: Eine Philosophie der Pflanzen, Munich 2018, p. 25.