Jeffrey Kroll
Kroll’s mastery at creating fluid yet structured form, juxtaposing and manipulating colour of intense impact and brilliance and his huge skill at layering paint with force, finesse and subtlety, puts his work in a class of its own. His dizzying inspiration and output is phenomenal. The physical and mental impact of the work, hanging in boardroom, boudoir and baronial hall worldwide, can take you ‘over the edge’, out of this world and into a universe of pure plastic art in form and content, line and colour. It is a sophisticated combination of the rational, the natural and the metaphysical with a continual internal balancing of these universally conflicting and harmonising elements; the core of its irrepressible strength and enduring popularity.
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Emil Herker 2010
By using bright smashing colours, unusual and provoking arrangements or radical
picture extracts, Herker draws our eyes to familiar, but hardly noticed day-to-day items. He surprises with seemingly banal objects from our closest surroundings and invites us to develop a new, individual point of view. They often appear chaotic with no beginning and no end representing today’s fast lifestyle. Like the pop artists of the 60s, and in particular the works of Andy Warhol and later the kitsch creations of Jeff Koons, Herker takes the banal and elevates them to the aesthetic and sublime. He uses mundane, disposable, everyday objects to weave a narrative and draw in the viewer. Like Gerhard Richter and Gottfried Helnwein, Emil Herker uses the techniques of photorealism to lend more substance to the story. It is a means to an end, and not just the end itself, a tool that allows him to raise questions about modern society, politics and the environment and comment on contemporary issues with humour and fun. Herker depicts contemporary society’s concerns and behaviour through still life. Our visual language is made up of advertisements, consumer-goods, labels, and manufactured images. Herker’s paintings are a two-dimensional simulacra of modern life and the consumption that our lives revolve around. Emil Herker is the artist as story-teller, something which we may have long forgotten in this era of conceptualist and post-post-modern art. The artist combines in his work a compelling, aesthetic force with subversively critical, moral and philosophical messages. The typographic or figurative elements can rarely be perceived as a whole due to too |