Alexander König »Mutterboden«
30 April—18 June 2016

Alexander König has an almost conspiratorial relationship with colour. As if from a solid block with a living structure, König uses paint on canvas to formulate spaces and expanses, and in them, centrally or selectively, figures, figurations of human-animal hybrid beings that rise up out of the underworld and the subconscious and show their bizarre characteristics out of their imperfect form of existence. Vast areas remain behind them as pure material and potential, as the primordial matter of colour.

The small selection of works in the »Mutterboden« cabinet show highlights essential aspects of König's technical and thematic repertoire. And it makes visible in very different examples how his sceneries rise between reality and possibility and assert bizarre worlds. The fertile topsoil of colour, on which König sows the ideas for his pictorial worlds, grants him a potential feasibility of imaginable and unimaginable subjects and at the same time the problematic of anything goes.

A male nude with sword and steel helmet under an angelic aura of light in front of a river landscape or the martially majestic enthroned eagle chained in torchlight or likewise a fragment of plant nature between lovely and monstrous in the exploding ejection of forms, colours and allusions - all this is released by the same fertile ground and grows from materialised darkness to light. The heroic motifs are familiar from the work of Markus Lüpertz and Anselm Kiefer, and Georg Baselitz's work is also familiar with the pose of the hero. König puts this pictorial possibility to a new test.

Alexander König's expressive, gestural painting style underlines the dynamic of the growing spread of pictorial worlds. Anyone who has experienced one of his paintings will recognise each of his works.
—By Tina Simon 
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Dr. phil. Tina Simon
Author and publicist, Leipzig


Alexander König, born 1976 in Trier, lives and works in Leipzig and Berlin, 1996-2003 studied art, history and art history at Leipzig University,
2008 studied painting at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts,
2009 foundation of the project OneNightGallery with Sven Bergelt and Georg Brückmann, 2011 diploma, class of Prof. Annette Schröter, Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig.
Exhibitions in Basel [CH], Mechelem [BE], Beirut [LY], Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig, Trier, Speyer, Offenbach, Ansbach, Mannheim, Zwickau and others.

The works of Alexander König are in the Silbersee Collection, Felix Collection, Hildebrand Collection, Schubert Collection, SØR Rusche Collection, Holzmeier Collection, Sparkasse Leipzig Collection, among others.
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