Galerie Kornfeld
VOLTA11 Basel 2015

Trained as a photographer, Hubertus Hamm has departed from the beaten track of classical photography, and has shifted his practice to sculpture and installation.
On show at our booth a selection of Molded Mirrors – razor-thin stainless steel sheets, surface treated to be highly reflective and then deformed by a hammer. Standing like dolmen or hanging on the wall thus deceptively suggesting the two-dimensionality of painting and photography, these bodies take up and shape the surrounding space with authority.
Molded Mirrors' raison d'etre is to be found in our age of virtual and augmented reality, one in which boundaries between illusion and truth have inexorably lost their poignancy, opening the doors to flux and its relativity. The works of Hubertus Hamm are exhibited worldwide, including at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich or the Juan Art Museum in Beijing (2015).
At 32 years old, Alexander Kroll has experimented with more painting styles, processes and vagabond ideas than artists twice his age. Rolling, dropping, flicking, smearing, erasing, layering, collaging, blotting and risking, Kroll constructs his canvasses, sometimes five at once, through a fearless, uninhibited projection of movement and wonder. His art investigates painting's limits. Kroll canvasses are wondrous as thin, deep, time-eroded, layered, emotive, riotously colored sit harmoniously together on the surface. The large paintings are profoundly psychological, a map of the weather for the past 100 years, collapsed geometric blocks and scaffolding, blobs of time drifting by; the artist is attempting to paint the world. As much as the paintings document time and human passage, they also feel psychic or even the opposite - prehistoric and prequel. Contradiction and accommodation make Kroll paintings alluring and quizzical.