Kevin Klamminger: Promethean Approach

6 Nov-8 Dec 2024

Kevin Klamminger, Promethean Approach, 2024, Oil and sawdust on canvas 200 x 155 cm

Overview

Kevin Klamminger’s first UK solo exhibition, Promethean Approach, explores an interplay of contradictory forces, laying bare the tensions inherent to the process of artistic creation.

Precariously balanced between Klamminger’s conscious and unconscious minds, this new series of paintings combines a visual language of hyperreal motifs within a dramatically surreal landscape.

On self-reflection, the Austrian artist feels that many of his paintings could easily have been abstract, in which impressionistic forms clash in a bid to eventually find harmony. Promethean Approach, however, provides a more concrete search for meaning through its figurative imagery, using a collection of representational motifs to ground the viewer in the real world despite its dreamlike atmosphere. Horses, butterflies, shields and spears appear like clues that draw us into a search for meaning. While Klamminger does not abdicate responsibility for the significance of these symbols, he neither wishes to foreclose the interpretations of others and hopes to leave each painting up to the viewer’s interpretation. Just as Prometheus (the exhibition’s eponymous Titan) gave the fire of creation to humanity in classical mythology, so too does Klamminger impart a vitality to his artworks that gives them lives distinct from the designs of their maker.

To Klamminger, psychoanalysing his own imagery would open too many doors he does not necessarily want to go through. Promethean Approach explores the idea of the creative process itself. It does not attempt to analyse this process, but visualise it, translating the artist’s inner dialogue onto the canvas as it takes shape in all its contradictory and mysterious glory.

Artists