Werner Krug

"Minoic Visions"

01.08.1999 - 30.09.1999

Werner Krug was born in 1947 in the town of Tauberbischofsheim in Frankonia. As art teacher and practising artist his main interest has been in painting. The themes of his intellectual and artistic considerations covering a very wide field are being shown to visitors at the LAUDA FabrikGalerie during the months of September and October. "Reflections" for example is the name of a series of seven large-size paintings. They demonstrate a new form of the artist coming to terms with the four decisive elements of our existence. Visions of sky, earth, water and light. We are part of the space between heaven and earth and can only live in harmony with them. The pictures have been created out of the necessity to be part of this harmony in and with nature. The landscape becomes the symbol of life. It mirrors its conditions: light and shade, lightness and gravity, and everything in between, the transitions in fact, the stages of existence. Sky, water and earth combine fluidly to form an imaginary world. It reflects the inner condition between man and nature. Both are linked in it by permanent forces and laws whose observance is the precondition for the equilibrium of life. It is only in the stillness and space of areas formed by light and shade that the tensions are resolved and the contradictions are reconciled. Peace fills the emptiness of space and creates the harmony which our life requires. Technically, these pictures (oil on tempera glazed) are the result of a lengthy process which passes through the stages of colour photography and initial watercolour studies and eventually leads to the impressive final result. The colouring of the pictures is greatly restrained, almost monochrome, and yet very much alive. Sombre blue and green tones trending towards black, together with strongly elaborated light-dark contrasts, create a dynamic atmosphere, a world dominated by a sense of coldness and abandonment. Krug the artist is however not inspired by nature or landscape alone. Massive archaic buildings for example appear shadowy in the "Minoic Visions" which are bathed in ochre-yellow light, the results of a time spent on Crete. The shapes and colours of the exhibits thus mirror the actually invisible inner world of the person who created these structures according to an inner vision. The images thus rendered visible are therefore mirror and window to the intellectual world of the individual. In the end they represent the subjective impressions and responses to our experienced visualised world, and are therefore experienced reality. This philosophical background is digested by the artist in his paintings and is converted into travel impressions, nature compositions or his dealings with social criticism. The attempt for his impressions of experiencing the world to be expressed into words has in the meantime resulted in two very successful books published by Frankonia Verlag.

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