Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is delighted to present the second solo exhibition of Hans Kotter in London. "Replaced" features new photographs and LED screen light boxes by the German artist and includes parts of a large-scale light installation from recycled media components which will be shown for the first time in London and parallel in Vienna in a different version at Galleria Michaela Stock.
Capturing the movement, shaping and shifting of light, "Replaced" explores Kotter’s core theme of how to give shape to light. The coolness of the materials, the antiseptic cleanliness of the advertisement world once again merge with the natural feel and organic smoothness of Kotter’s iconic abstract botanical forms.
Hans Kotter’s most challenging and title-giving installation of the show, Replaced, will stretch throughout the front part of the downstairs gallery. Aluminum light-boxes serve as a bright, textured and colourful light source, joined together like tiles in a kaleidoscope of minimal shapes. All light boxes are recycled and reworked material form advertising campaigns that relate back to a large-scale installation in a Austrian public institution in Klagenfurt.
In contrast to the original installation most of the surfaces are sprayed with glossy colour gradients and installed together with perforated metal plates and steel bars leaning against painted wall sections.
For the London show Patrick Heide Contemporary Art especially commissioned new works from Kotter’s prolific Chromatic Plant series. A stunning quintet of five vertical shapes will be mounted as ilfochrome prints with diasec face. But "Replaced" will also feature 3 spectacular new works whose prototype was presented at the Kinetica fair in London in spring. Mounted as large scale slides with moving LED faces, these high-tech objects raise Kotter’s artistic experiments to an innovative new level.
Kotter’s imagery mostly originates from macro-shots of light breaking in glass objects, with the macro lens zooming in on tiny details of glass prisms or drops of oil. In the moving LED surfaces these organic, winding, partly convoluted compositions suddenly become landscapes alive with the chromatic change of colours. All lines and contours seem to start shifting in tranquil and beautiful movements and infuse the evolving colour schemes with a tactile sensation recording the passing and transience of time.
The light artist’s rigorous approach yet ambivalent language place Kotter’s art on the borderline of art and design, of campness and beauty, of high-tech and found object and can be contextually placed amongst the artistic endeavors of Juan Pardo, Anton Henning and Jeppe Hein.
Born in 1966 in Mühldorf am Inn (Germany), Hans Kotter studied in New York at Art Students League and attended the Media Design Akademie in Munich, Germany. He has exhibited widely in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and New York. His installation piece “Balance”, a crevice in the floor and walls emanating blue light that seems to cut the space in half, was permanently installed at London's Kinetica Museum.
Hans Kotter is featured in Europe’s most prominent collection of light art, the Targetti Collection in Florence, as well as the collection of the Deutsche Bundestag (German Parliament), Berlin. Amongst the exhibition highlights were recent shows in public institutions in Klagenfurt (Austria), Stuttgart and Aschaffenburg (Germany) and London.
Hans Kotter lives and works in Berlin.