works in pubic space (a selection)

Deutscher Bundestag, Berlin
Kunstsammlung der Universität Bochum
Kunstmuseum Bonn
MMM Bozen
Kunstmuseum Chur
Kunsthalle Darmstadt
Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden
Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren
Kunstsammlung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
MAMCO, Genf
Hamburger Kunsthalle
Mittelrhein-Museum Koblenz
Museum Ludwig, Köln
Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig
Museum Schloß Morsbroich, Leverkusen
Kunstsammlung des Landes Rheinland-Pfalz, Mainz
Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim
Museum Schloß Moyland
Lenbachhaus, München
Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
Neues Museum Weimar
Von-der-Heydt-Museum Wuppertal

What is landscape?
The picturesque answers of Thomas Kohl

By Evelyn Weiss from publication Über die Ebene hin, 2004

Let’s imagine a painting cut into small pieces of approximately even coloration and then used as the stones of a folding game. Even where such a stone is not monochromatic, it should not suggest a spatial form, but appear as a flat spot of colour, and only in conjunction with the others will it become a piece of sky, a shadow, a shine, a concave or convex surface, etc.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on color”¹

If the quotation from Wittgenstein leads into the deeper layers of knowledge of Thomas Kohl’s working process, the answer to the title question encompasses the aesthetic core of his work in a larger context. At first, everyone will find an answer to the question of what landscape is. Everyone knows some landscape, lovely or frightening, radiant or dark, mysterious or open. Everyone associates experiences, moods, feelings with landscape. Everybody carries the image of nature and the forest as a primal pattern within himself, which at the same time means the primal pattern of infinity and immensity.
In the early French structuralism of the 1950s, Gaston Bachelard, a forerunner of Michel Foucault, referred to the concept of “inner immensity” in connection with landscape in his “Poetics of Space”. It arises from a whole group of impressions that have nothing to do with the geographer’s information. Especially in the natural space of the forest he sees a world without borders: “… his spatial secret, stretched over the veil of trunks and leaves in an indeterminate distance, veiled for the eyes, is actually a transcendental psychological function. “2
The forest, nature as a state of mind, as a concept of a seen, felt boundlessness, which here is derived less from the philosophy of romanticism than from the psychology of perception, may have been what the young art student at the Düsseldorf Academy had in mind when he drew for hours outside the master class, shivering with cold.
With a very hard, sharpened pencil he drew thin, sparse lines on the white paper. He drew in nature but not according to nature. He did not reproduce anything, did not represent anything.
Drawing for hours on end was an extremely concentrated exercise that the art student forced himself to do. In this very long phase, in which he exclusively drew and practiced, the artist expanded his visual judgement and his visual knowledge. To persevere, he subjected himself to a strict physical and mental discipline. During his studies one should learn something: Thomas Kohl learned to draw, to set signs. An art practice that he still practices today, after having dedicated himself to painting since 1989. Suggested landscapes become visible on paper, lines condense into mountains and valleys, and yet for all its recognisability it is a highly abstract process.
Even if the line of the drawing simulates a landscape contour, it remains a purely artificial element that is not copied from nature. At the beginning of this year, Thomas Kohl traveled to Morocco and created a series of drawings on very small sheets (Fig. pp. 12-19, drawings from the Essaouira Sketchbook, 2004, 9.7 x 14.5 cm, not in the catalogue). The pencil trace has become somewhat softer, wider than in the earliest works, the highest reduction has remained. Sometimes only a line appears as a horizon – or a sand dune, sometimes a mountain range appears in the distance, a bend in the valley. A great power and fascination emanates from these drawing miniatures; slowly the magnificent African landscape with its expanses, with its deserts, with light, sun and mountains emerges before us as a mirage of our senses. This can only happen if the drawing is an act of highest concentration, an extreme tension, which focuses on a small white paper surface.
Over twenty years separate these Moroccan miniatures from the first drawings created by the then twenty-year-old student of the Gerhard Richter class. Eight years were to pass before he changed pencils with brushes in 1989 and painted his first oil painting. The procedure of painting was actually identical to that of drawing. Kohl “drew” with the brush and the paint directly on the canvas, a direct alla prima painting, an act of painting that is only interrupted by the drying times. And the discourse of content of this painting remains identical with the drawing: the landscape.
This was initially the most surprising thing about the works of Thomas Kohl: to meet a young artist who consciously limits himself to the representation of landscapes with the last consequence in his art. The end of this genre had already been clearly indicated at the beginning of our century. The ecological catastrophe that is changing and destroying our landscape was precisely observed and predicted. But even the positivist view of the world, which postulated the triumph of mechanical precision, no longer saw any possibility of existence for landscape representation.
At first glance, one is amazed and surprised by Kohl’s landscape paintings. Our eyes encounter familiar, familiar, recalled images of mountains and hills, of valleys and rivers, of trees and horizon lines that are captured on the canvas with spontaneous and rapid brushstrokes. At the same time, however, the feeling creeps in that these pictures are different from, for example, the landscapes of the Impressionists, which immediately come to mind here. The Impressionists painted outside in sun, wind and weather, they went out with prepared canvases to capture the light and its changes in the landscape. Kohl’s landscapes are not painted outside in nature, en plein air, but without exception in his studio.
And so the big decisive difference is the light, that is, the missing source of light in Kohl’s paintings. Here, light and shadow are not cast from any point, here no moon and no sun illuminate some parts of the picture brightly to leave others in the dark, here the light seems to be absorbed by the entire picture texture. The bright areas above the horizon line and between the trees are by no means visible as sources of light, but only show a different degree of brightness in their coloration.
Kohl’s pictures do not describe anything, they do not tell of familiar landscapes and areas. All identifiable features are deliberately omitted, nothing anecdotal can be determined. The artist looks for the most general feature of a landscape, for archetypal patterns, which he then uses freely. In this way, one constantly thinks one recognizes something, only to discover that this or that area is not represented at all. Kohl’s paintings are projections of ideas, of feelings and moods that change the appearance of nature within us. The artist, the viewer, the landscape become protagonists of a subtle game of perception and cognition with distributed roles.
It is no coincidence that the artist took such an in-depth interest in the novella fragment “Lenz” (1835) by Georg Büchner and then created a series of 23 paintings. He gave them quotes from the text as titles. The various moods of pain and euphoria, of grief and happiness, of hope and despair that the poet Lenz experiences on his wanderings are congenially brought to life visually through Kohl’s paintings. They are in no way illustrations of the text passages, interpretations of the literary material.
Basically, the painter is never concerned with narrative content, with anecdotes, with the depiction of certain landscape motifs or certain cities, rivers or mountains. In picture series like “Lenz” one will never be able to establish a narrative strand. What is unifying in the series of pictures is revealed in a certain pictorial dynamic that develops completely anew from series to series.
The titles of the pictures are always an integral part of his oeuvre. The setting of titles is a creative act that is almost equal to painting and to which the artist attaches great importance. The titles are not created simultaneously with the completion of the paintings, but are often given much later. The titles are set according to very specific criteria: The titles have to fit in with the sound of the words, they have to be phonetically correct, they have to sound out the mood of the paintings, they have to correspond suggestively to the colours. The titles are speculations of the artist, which he passes on to us. A good example of these synaesthetic approaches is the title “Coimbra” (cat. no. 29-35, fig. p. 60/61) for a series of seven portrait-format paintings (oil on paper), which was created in 1999. The determining factor here is not a concrete memory of the old Portuguese city. It is also not important whether the artist was ever there, since he does not want to tell us his mood and feelings when visiting this city.
Decisive for the choice of the title was this wonderful, warm, embracing sound of the word “Coimbra”, where in the middle the soft “m” nestles up to the hard “b” and in the tremolo of the “r” the sound continues to vibrate melodically. The sound of the colours is conveyed in an analogous manner. The soft areas in the upper third of the painting, in exquisite and restrained pink-grey tones, are harder, sparing but very deliberately placed brushstrokes, but are also absorbed by the harder, sparing but very deliberately placed brushstrokes, while the large white space below absorbs the echo of the action. And should the melancholically serious melodies of the Portuguese fado song perhaps ring in the ears of the viewer, this would not be a too precise, musical topographical definition for the interpretation of the pictures – but it would be possible.
The titles have never been closer to the picture than in the series based on Büchner’s “Lenz” fragment. There, for example, a picture is described with the following lines: “Everything merged into one line for him, like a rising and sinking wave between heaven and earth; it was as if he were lying on an endless sea that rose and swayed softly” (Cat. No. 74). Here it almost seems as if Büchner had written this in view of the pictures of Kohl. The painter sensed the congeniality of the pictorial and literary language and chose 23 passages from the novella as titles. In Thomas Kohl’s work, the setting of the title is an act of high reflection and a spontaneous idea at the same time. It is a strategic decision for the positioning of the work and for its later reception.
The longer we immerse ourselves in Kohl’s pictures, the less familiar they seem to us in the conventional sense, the more the conviction becomes apparent that we have never seen the pictures before, that they do not have much in common with the landscapes that we carry within us as a common heritage of art history, that these pictures constantly elude any kind of definition. The more intensely one looks at the pictures, the clearer the high painterly quality, the sensitive treatment of the surfaces, the incredibly rich nuance of the colour palette; it is precisely the restriction to a certain colour scale, in which the colours green, ochre, blue predominate, that makes the nuance and modulation of the tones particularly prominent. The closer one gets to these pictures, the more one penetrates them, the stronger the impression that this is non-representational painting. The memory of landscapes evaporates more and more. Trees, mountains, valleys? At most contours of landscapes, skeletons of mountains, hints of trees as colour conglomerates. As in an eruption, earthy things are trembling upwards into the space, while from above veils of colour drip down. With his abstract vocabulary of forms, however, Kohl does not stand in the tradition of early 20th-century non-objective painting, as exemplified by Wassily Kandinsky, nor does he follow the Informel in Europe after 1945 or the American Abstract Expressionism of a Jackson Pollock or Franz Kline. We associate Kohl’s painting more with the magical landscape impressions of William Turner, dissolved in light, whereby Caspar David Friedrich’s melancholy soul-health in the face of the infinite cosmos interferes with our perception like a filter.
Unfortunately, this often happens when too obvious filiations are not questioned in the first place. In our case, of course, Kohl’s paintings have as little to do with the perception and treatment of light, the main protagonist in Turner’s pictures, as they do with Friedrich’s melancholy world view of German Romanticism. Although such connections flash up again and again, the viewer of Kohl’s paintings would do well to take one step at a time to bid farewell to all too firmly meant models in the tradition of art.
The apparent spontaneity and immediacy of Kohl’s painting is always preceded by an intellectually disciplined decision. The creative process for these paintings is therefore long and short at the same time. For the “incubation period” is very long. Landscapes are first created for a long time in his head, only to become concrete relatively quickly in a series on the canvas. It is a process reminiscent of the working method of Giorgio Morandi, who spent days and weeks arranging his famous bottles and vases for his still lifes in order to then paint the pictures in a very short time.
Spontaneous and disciplined at the same time, Thomas Kohl has thus chosen: for painting and for landscape. In the 21st century, can the inventive spirit conquer new domains here, set up new canons? Kohl is modest but confident: “I don’t want to invent a new scale, but I want to get everything out of it.” Whoever gets involved with these tones, whoever pursues the searching certainty of the artist, whoever makes himself at home in his islands of colour, will discover many things: the bubbling earth, the tranquillity of a river landscape, the turmoil of growth, the agitation and the sublime. Whoever gets involved will feel the euphony of the chromatic scale, the delicacy of passing cloud formations in blue sky fields, such as in the most recent watercolour series. Whoever gets involved in this can unexpectedly arrive at himself. Thomas Kohl’s painting can mean a new perception of one’s own self.

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen über die Farbe, Frankfurt a. M. 1979, No. 266, p. 108.

2 Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, Munich n.y. (Ullstein book 3136), p. 215.

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