For over four decades now, the Munich artist Victor Kraus has been exploring the possibilities of a form of painting that consciously addresses the subjects and qualities of Classical Modernism. At the same time, in dealing with these instruments, he reflects contemporary debates around painting with the greatest possible freedom.

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His interiors, landscapes, and biomorphic forms of recent years illuminate the mystery behind the familiar. Active at the border of abstraction, his flower and plant fragments are vehicles that sharpen the senses both to the essence of the natural world surrounding us and to the world shaped by us. Thus reality can mutate into magic. “I use the subject-matter as an occasion for an image and try to liberate it from its function, from the burden of its purpose in order to subject it to another order—perhaps that of beauty. This often happens through strong reduction, dissolution of the physical, and elimination of weight or shadow. The projection of space onto a non-illusionistic surface also contributes to the transformation of the objects into a purely pictorial reality. In particular, it is the collage of partly and coincidentally soiled colored papers that I frequently use that has a material part to play in this.”