Colour and Space
6th August - 12th September 2004

"If I were a painter", wrote Roland Barthes in 1975, "I should paint only colours: this field seems to me freed of both the Law (no Imitation, no Analogy) and Nature (for after all, do not all the colours in Nature come from the painters?)" Peter Kalkhof's long and inventive painterly practice may be described as a body of work in which the artist has constantly striven to produce an accumulation of autonomous experiential encounters for the viewer. Influenced in part by the Northern romantic tradition of painting (Friedrich, Kandinsky, Turner and others), in the last analysis Kalkhof's work sets up its own artistic co-ordinates and aesthetic rules. Heavily affected by his extensive travels, Kalkhof has developed a practice which draws upon diverse cultural forms without in any way being subservient to them. The work's "nature" is thus brazenly particular, self-determining, an amalgam of vivid, intelligently expressive constraints.

Central to Kalkhof's work is an exploration of colour and its powerful, sensuous determinations. Utilising the conventional medium of paint on canvas Kalkhof presents individual abstract paintings as parts of extensive floor-based and wall-mounted installations, giving a new twist to the possibility of how painting may be staged and perceived. His new work, of which the present exhibition is the first public display, is comprised of three large multi-part compositions, Scatter, Colour, Space (two) pieces and Colour Space, Texture. If these titles are merely descriptive of procedures and formal features, the works themselves confront the viewer with the matter of how abstract painting, with its now substantial history, continues to be innovative and uncompromising in its intentions, critical ambitions and effects.

Peter Kalkhof was born in Germany in 1933 and has lived and worked in Britain for over 40 years. He has exhibited extensively in Britain and abroad and has work in numerous public and private collections worldwide. In London he is represented by the Annely Juda Fine Art.