Alexander König »Elmsfeuer /St. Elmo’s Fire«
September 12—October 13, 2009

Spinnerei Gallery Tour:
Saturday, September 12, 11 am—9 pm
Sunday, September 13, 11 am—6 pm

St. Elmo’s Fire—a rare, pale, cold-looking light observable at the ends of grounded objects in atmospheric electrical fields, for example ship’s sails and masts, crosses at the tops of mountains, and church steeples. Physically, it is the glow of plasma, ionized molecules of nitrogen and oxygen before or during lightning storms.

This cold, seemingly sourceless light is what brings the sceneries out of darkness in Alexander König’s pictures; it seems to lend them an eerie, ethereal mood and to bind them between the poles of almost religious, auratic glorification and the mostly dark, earthy tones of the background. The figures carry their own nimbus, thereby underscoring a certain detachment.

Alexander König conceives the picture and its objects as an apparition that lives and emerges out of the [painting] material while remaining bound to the material that, after all, composes the picture. Here the determinants of becoming and being a picture are on the same level; they form the threshold between invocation and manufacture that allows appearances, beings, and states to shine through and to emerge in the picture as a material product from the darkness covering the pictures. Here, König calls the portrait painting of the 17th century into the witness stand; it usually had its personnel appear against an indeterminate background, focusing on the face, which was equipped with the attributes of its being and its story. With König, these portraits turn into strange, short-statured figures in a wizened, gnomelike form, as if their burrowing in the forest and plowed earth on which they move kept them from thriving, as if they could not renounce this ground from which they seem to grow. Illuminated to look washed out and unreal, they congeal to ghostly scenes somewhere between nocturnes and votives that resist being in a clear, temporally definable situation.

Here the uncertainties, uncanniness, apparitions, and collective myths manifest themselves as they may arise from a specific cultural soil. Stories and sagas, folk customs and superstition—less those passed down than their artificial [de-] formations—take the role of godparents.

Lightness is no invention of this young painter. Alexander König captures his pictures, picture objects, and mode of painting in a kind of differentiated coarseness. An expressive gesture determines the overall character of the picture. Coarse, large surfaces, nervous brushwork and color gradients are clearly visible, but always shimmer along the boundary to differentiated painting that does not disown either soul, neither the purely painterly soul that lives from the material, nor the soul of narrative figuration, whereby, however, illusionistic spatial depth is mostly avoided. Everything takes place on the picture’s surface and moves close to the viewer. Sometimes the personnel seems hacked, or hewn into the painting surface, shaped with coarse tools, but here and there executed in greater and more gracile detail, which seems to press the protagonists back into the picture surface and overlay them with a light sfumato.

The pictures and their personnel are thus artifacts that seem as if they want to breathe, in the field of tension between appearance and its material bonds; and so they carry their figures into a parallel reality that promises them the breath of life, but cannot free them.

Alexander König, b. 1976 in Trier, DE, lives and works in Leipzig
1996-2003 Studies History and History of Art, University of Leipzig
Studies Fine Art/Painting, Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig [HGB]

The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday from 11 am to 6 pm.
Josef Filipp, Michaela Rosbach, and Jörg Rosbach look forward to your visit.
For additional information and viewing appointments, call: +49 [0] 172.373 11 10