Caroline von GroneLIVE Übertragung

“When I walk through a museum, I can tell which picture was painted from a model and which was not!” – Caroline von Grone has a sharp and incorruptible eye for situations and portraits. In 1991 she was a master student of Klaus Rinke at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and had, quite untypically for the time, turned to portrait painting, either with models she had approached in underground stations, for example, or with people who had commissioned a portrait from her. It is one of her strengths that she does not “invent” her observations. This goes hand in hand with a visual acuity that affords viewers great pleasure. For time and again the pictures also offer the picture within the picture: abstractly conceived tiled walls, floor tiles or the interiors of public places such as telephone boxes or ticket machines. Again and again she has also painted houses, for instance houses in a north German housing estate before they were demolished. It is precisely such final states that have interested her – a kind of counterpole to the photography of the Bechers, say. Painting in public has always been part of Caroline von Grone’s practice, for otherwise, she says, she “wouldn’t get that still-life-like presence into the picture, if I were to attempt it from a photograph.”

Exhibition:
Galerie der Stadt Backnang, 13/5 – 13/8/2023