Galerie Bernd Kugler

The painting of German artist Holger Endres (*1971 in Speyer, lives in Mannheim) is rooted in radical reduction. Over the years, the artist has developed a reduced formal language from the black line as the fundamental painterly mark on the canvas. In this language, serial sequences or geometric shapes either ban illusionistic spatiality from the picture or mark spaces. Holger Endres goes one step further in La Neige and Le Grand Poulet. In the large format oil paintings, which are reminiscent of color field painting, spaces are defined by the combination of two rectangles in different colors. The paintings‘ geometric rigor is broken up by stencil like omissions, which even allow associations with the figurative when viewed. Are there in La Neige two eyes staring out from the color fields? And do the paintings of Le Grand Poulet perhaps show sad, upside down smileys, thus revealing an anthropomorphic core, as it were, within their geometric austerity? The motif of „upside down“ takes as its starting point living beings with a head thus basically the thinking individual. The inversion into the vertical opposite could therefore be understood as an ironic game. But perhaps this interpretation is merely subjective, and the white omissions can also be read in a completely different way? In any case, in the works of both series, in La Neige and Le Grand Poulet, Endres has just as consistently liberated himself from the dogma of the black line as he has broken away from firmly defined color spaces.

Holger Endres, born 1971 in Speyer/Rhein, lives and works in Mannheim, 1998 – 2004 Butoh dance and Performance Art by Minako Seki, Yumiko Yoshioka and Ishii Mitsutaka, 2000 – 2005 studies at Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe (Germany) with Max Kaminski, Erwin Gross and Elke Silvia Krystufek

Galerie Bernd Kugler Since its founding in the year 2004 Galerie Bernd Kugler has been representing contemporary art by international artists. The first exhibitions of the gallery showed works by Per Kirkeby, Eugène Leroy (in collaboration with Michael Werner) and André Butzer. Solo presentations by Thilo Heinzmann, Andy Hope 1930 and Anna Kolodziejska followed. Ever since, a focus on young art particularly from contemporary Germany has shaped the gallery’s profile. Next to giving exposure to graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe from very early onwards our gallery has presented selected postitions of the dynamic Berlin art scene to an Austrian audience. Curated themed exhibitions complete the gallery’s program. Dedicated to various facets of the artistic process they also invite the dialogue with artists who are not part of the actual gallery programme: Ross Bleckner – Erwin Gross/2020, Protrait/2019, Flowers/2018, Le monde pictorial: Eugène Leroy, Tobias Hantmann/2017, Animalism/2016, Still still life/2016, In Cooperation with./2015, Endoscopia Part 1,2/2014, Il faut être peintre…/2013. Galerie Bernd Kugler places strong emphasis on a close, long-term collaboration with its artists. Recurring solo presentations give insight into into the development of an artistic oeuvre. From our point of view and experience this is an important premise for a sustained positioning and referral to private and public collections. Accompanying publications are a matter of course to the gallery, as is the edition of artists‘ catalogues.