image: Oliver Gröne, 21 (Stilleben), 2017, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm
Trees, landscapes and still lifes. On the basis of a thematically limited and yet inexhaustible quantity of subjects Oliver Gröne has been working about the impacts of European art history for a number of years. In doing so, his particular strength is not the rejection of what has already been achieved, but rather its adaptation and individual artistic development.
In his new series of works, the painter primarily plays with compositions from the 1920s. With great ease, he adduces aspects and elements of analytical cubism or Pittura Metafisica, combines them, sets them together, complements and exaggerates them.
Next to the covered gray of the still lifes by Braque and Picasso, Oliver Gröne places color fields of bright blue, yellow and pink. Once dogmatically appealing outlines and bodies transmitted strictly into the surface are quoted and at the same time overruled by the formation of pictorial space and illusionistic depth.
Opaque colour masses sometimes irritate the view of the beholder facing these paintings. As wide, undefined colour spaces full of light or shadow they are letting associations run freely. While concrete models are identifiable and objects such as landscape elements remain recognizable in some cases, Oliver Gröne here brings the abstraction to a head and, with outlines that can not be relatable, also gives a stage to the absurd. With great pleasure he experimentally plays with light acrylic and heavy oil paints and thus - among other things - finds the arrangement of the pictorial levels.
Like a declaration of love, Oliver Gröne takes up the contents of the 20th century - a century in which he has been socialized and whose society as well as visual world have been characterized by radical changes.
Dedicating his works particularly to the most formative utopia of freedom, Oliver Gröne combines an exploration of bodies, surfaces and layers on the background with atmospheric colour effects, abstraction and the compositions of pictorial space in a most unbiasedly and unconstrained manner. By condensing the already existent detached from historically determined categories and dogmas, he again opens the door to new utopias. Why limitations, one might like to ask.