Exhibitions

past

Julian Khol

Sechsuhrdreißig

22/05/2015 - 11/07/2015

Sechsuhrdreißig

During the Whitsun Festival in Salzburg Gallery 2CforArt is opening the next exhibition with prints and drawings by Viennese artist Julian Khol. The opening will take place on Friday, May 22 at 18:00. The artist will be present. His brand new etchings will be presented for the first time.

Julian Khol began his career as a painter almost 15 years ago. From 2004 he studied at the University for Applied Arts in Vienna with Prof. Ludwig Attersee. From 2007 to 2010 he graduated from the master class with Herbert Brandl in Dusseldorf with the master student award.

Khols expressive, figurative style was influenced, among others, by the Vienna School of Schiele, or Hrdlicka, as well as from America of the 50s. His works move on the line between figuration and abstraction. They provide raw power, impish clarity of motifs and colors. The painted object mediates between solid color and perspective and opens up the space into three dimensions. In recent months, while concentrating on his prints he reorientatated to very graphic and figurative works. The color does not longer dominate but takes only a smaller space as in the beginning of his artistic career. The prints have thereby emerged as an essential part of his oeuvre.

Khol perceives repetition as an important factor and his work itself as evolutionary process which never stops, sometimes happening slowly, sometimes quickly. In this sense, he draws a subject until he has captured its soul. This is then transferred onto the printing plate. Due to the many repetitions the subject becomes second nature to Julian and he is then free from formal constraints in the large format painting and in the printmaking process.

Khol has a very clear idea of what his prints shall look like. During the printmaking process Khol applies several colors simultaneously to the printing plate instead of transferring the colors in multiple print sections as usual. This results in serial etchings, especially the color etchings having a nearly monotypic expression.

Khol is always looking for motives, watching, viewing, understanding, putting the environment and his own existence into question. Motifs come and go, until they “… are too perfect for me. And perfection bores me somehow. Then I put it in my mental archive for some time, sometimes they stay there. In my work, I am concerned with the formation of something – not with reproduction as in photography. You cannot paint exactly what you have in your imagination. But you can paint things which you previously did not have in imagination. If one intervenes in his painting with too much control one handicaps himself. The subconscious has a higher perception as consciousness. If that happens and the subconscious begins to paint, the painting is really interesting!”