Lot 31: JOHANNES KAHRS

Eifer-Sucht (Jealousy)
Signed, titled and dated ‘J. Kahrs “Eifer-Sucht” 1995’ on the reverse.

144.8 × 175.3 cm (57 × 69 in).

Oil on canvas in artist’s metal and glass frame.

1995

Galerie Franck + Schulte, Berlin; Private Collection, Germany

“Kahrs is fascinated by cinema. But what make his artistic ego tick are the switches and the breaks: the arrest of time in a still, and the sudden turn into something different than before … He acts as a mediator establishing a dialogue between the media-reality and the old masters of chiaroscuro. A man reads a newspaper in a hotel lobby, another one sits at an office desk and reads block notes, or a girl’s profile is lighted by a lamp. The age old academic subject for artists (figure in space) is not re-newed in terms of an extravagant perception or technique, but in terms of the subtle ambivalence between newspaper pictures and old master paintings … You feel their presence. Looking at them, there is always a white spot, something open you are drawn to and that structures the relation of the pictures in the space.”

(Peter Herbstreuth, ‘Johannes Kahrs, Frank + Schulte’, Flash Art, vol. XXXI, no. 200, May–June 1998, pp. 103–04)