A house, a tree, a table, a window, a ladder: these are some of the everyday motifs captured by Karl Bohrmann with both accentuated off-handedness and great virtuosity. In addition to painting, print, and photography, his oeuvre, spanning 50 years, is particularly impressive in terms of its comprehensive collection of drawings. Bohrmann’s figures, landscapes, and still lifes, which oscillate between abstraction and figuration, not only testify to the immediacy with which they were made, but achieve maximum vigor as a result of their reduced quality and unpretentiousness. Again and again, an exploration of spatiality – from inside to outside – plays a central role in his work. As such, the line itself becomes an actor; it enters into a tense dialogue with surfaces that are sometimes homogeneous and quiet, sometimes energetic and vibrant. Bohrmann created a multidimensional pictorial cosmos that combined the simple with the poetic, the ephemeral with the permanent, and the quiet with the spontaneous. Work by the artist can be found in important collections ranging from the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich, to the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
