'Bernd Koberling’s watercolours celebrate with liberated joie de vivre...
the wealth of phenomena of the world not made by human beings. Vitality is the motive force and motif of his art. It transfers from that nature surrounding the artist to him and to his works.' – Kirsten Claudia Voigt
Koberling’s depictions are extraordinarily eventful. With each picture, he succeeds in involving the viewer anew in a complex process of perception that guides the eyes through a multitude of lines, surfaces, heights and abysses and allows them to discover the unexpected. Islands of colour of luminous transparency and heavy depth emerge and blur with lines and other forms. They assert themselves as idiosyncratic formations, detached from their surroundings and at the same time embedded in delicate, strong or pastel tones.
Koberling perceives flowers, light and climate with great sensitivity, absorbs them and transfers them, charged with almost elementary significance, not only onto paper but also into his view of the world. All this allows him to react to what he saw earlier and felt later, even when detached from that place. Koberling’s watercolours are therefore not mere depictions of what he has seen, but also always experiences and sensations with and through nature, brought to paper with a light stroke, as if the brush had followed a trail in the flow of paint.
Like other artists of his generation, Koberling had already begun to explore the possibilities of painting with great freedom in the early 1960s. However, compared to Georg Baselitz, K.H. Hödicke or Markus Lüpertz, for example, he seemed to dedicate himself to figuration with far greater distance, in part because while he turned to nature and landscape early on he did not bind himself to these subjects.
This exhibition shows that Koberling is a master at achieving great impact even with small watercolours. He challenges the viewer to observe and knows how to gently draw them into his intuitive, emotional painting, which is lively but only rarely restless. It is the painterly visualisation of the world that Bernd Koberling has experienced and internalised, and which becomes visually tangible here.
The works shown in the exhibition are part of the catalogue Bernd Koberling: Zweihundertsiebenundneunzig Aquarelle (German/English, 322 pages), published by KEWENIG. The book is available at the gallery.
Bernd Koberling (b. 1938 in Berlin) taught painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg from 1981 and at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin from 1988 to 2007. His work was shown at the beginning of the 1980s at legendary exhibitions such as A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (1981) and Zeitgeist at the Martin-Gropius-Bau (1982). He has been a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts since 2012. His work has been honoured with numerous solo exhibitions and most recently at the Museum Küppersmühle, Duisburg, in 2017. His works are part of institutional collections worldwide, such as ARoS Art Museum Arhus, Denmark; the Berlinische Galerie; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Nasjonalmuseet Oslo, Norway; Reykjavík Art Museum, Iceland; and the Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada. Koberling lives in Berlin.
