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After the 'Fog' (2009) and 'Equator' (2010) series, Kaufmann’s 'Ocean' cycle now deals with the image of the sea as an object of projection for dreams, desires, moods and emotional states. He approaches the topic from a pictorial, sculptural and literary perspective in a room-sized installation comprised of five large-scale canvases using predominantly blue and violet color.
Although minimal in composition, his paintings are extraordinarily complex due to their technical structure: Kaufmann molds thick layers of paint to the physical characteristics of the sea. They appear sometimes leaden, other times wild and hard, he whips the up canvases and breaks the waves.
Referring to Herman Melville's "Moby Dick", the painting titled "My Name is Ishmael" depicts an anti-hero figure that is armed with an ax to chase monsters under the water surface of a flooded living room interior. In „The Wave“ a daring rower, a contemporary Sisyphus, battles a monumental wave crest to bring himself and his house plant for safer shores.
A large room installation of painted and curved wooden panels accommodates a mechanical theater. Mobiles and various light sources cast reflections and shadows into the gallery and onto Kaufmann's portraits of dramatic, siren-like, haunting, frantic, or rhythmically-roaring waveforms and states of the sea in stark black-white contrast.
Kaufmann floats all the adventure, desires and fears of his protagonists and of human condition to the surface of his "Ocean" works
Ruprecht von Kaufmann was born 1974 in Munich. He studied painting at the Art Center College in Los Angeles. He lived in Los Angeles and New York for several years, moved to Berlin in 2003, where he currently lives and works. His works have been exhibited at numerous venues including the Fraktale IV exhibition at Palast der Republik, Berlin (2005), Kunsthalle Mannheim (2006) and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, Berlin (2007).
Since October 2012, he is a professor at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts.
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