Berlin, 2018
Nightcall
Zora Kreuzer works with colours. Her medium is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength between 380 and 760 nanometres, in other words: light, light perceivable for us. Kreuzer does not restrict herself to a single material but uses among others acrylic paint, pigment, wall paint, and of course direct light, mostly in the form of fluorescent tubes. Her colour palette spans the entire visible spectrum, although she specialises in neon colours. In her works Kreuzer not only explores the properties of the colours themselves, experiments with their intensity, the tonal value, the nuances and the temperatures of single colour shades, but deals especially with the combination and arrangement of colours and what effect they have in the room or on the wall.
In what way does our seeing change when we enter a room immersed in red light? How much more intense does the green light shining in from the adjacent room appear to us?
In Zora Kreuzer’s light rooms, the walls, ceiling and floor become flexible image carriers. She intervenes subtly in space, mixing light and thus colour, so that in smooth transitions a plurality of shades emerges which due to one’s own movement and length of stay in the room always vary in their appearance.
Perceptual-physiological effects like flickering colours (through the juxtaposition of high-contrast colours), the appearance of after-images (after a longer observation of a colour, its complementary colour becomes visible when the eyes are shut), or the perceived reduction of colour intensity through the habituation of the eye, are only a few examples of phenomena that occur repeatedly when observing her site-specific works.
For our perceptual faculties, the intense colours of the light surrounding us are a visual challenge: we perceive contrasts, depth effects and spatial properties differently, and at the same time we ourselves seem changed, just like everything that becomes visible outside of the space. What’s more is that seeing in itself is never static: the receptors in the human eye are in continual adjustment.
One could therefore describe Zora Kreuzer’s works as dynamic in a certain way, even though her artistic gesture is often minimal and also her paintings are characterised by reduced, geometric and static forms. Her engagement with light as colour and colour as material as well as her contemplations of surface and space result from a number of cultural and art historical references (illuminated advertising, pop culture, concrete painting, light art, minimal art…) and stimulate further reflection on an expanded notion of painting.
by Katharina Wendler
www.katharinawendler.com
translated by Matthew Burbidge
Fremantle, 2014
Morning After the Deluge
I’m just getting in when everyone is getting up.[1]
The relationship between light and painting is one of the most ardently pursued by artists throughout history. Tracking sunset and tracing twilight on canvas kept Canaletto in business and Turner on his toes, the latter obsessively repainting the Morning After the Deluge [2] in a bid to properly convey the waxing dawn. He wanted to achieve a luminescence in oil, capture that headiest of optical contrasts between the strata of orange as it gently expands on the horizon and the first gasp of blue it brings with it. The searing intensity of the west coast sunset and the subtle diffusion of light as the sun rises over the ocean inform the ‘neon pastel’ palette and colour field paintings of Zora Kreuzer. But it’s also what happens between dusk and dawn, inside the laser paradise of the nightclub, that the works find their meaning.
Zora Kreuzer grew up in Bonn, Germany, but moved to Berlin when she was 10 years old and started clubbing in the late 90s, a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her coming of age was in the wake of the infamous underground rave scene, the height of the iconic Love Parade festivals and the second wave of electronica and techno in the early 2000s. It was the turn of the century and a time of up-scaled laser light shows in industrial warehouses. Berlin was truly established as the techno capital during a time of unification across East and West, where ideas of synthesising were as much social as they were musical and conceptual.
The club scene was and continues to be like a synesthetic installation for Zora, where sound expresses colour and light is sonorised. These perceptual reference points fed into an expanded painting practice when Zora went to art school in Karlsruhe. There she connected with the concrete, hard edge and colour field artists of the 60s including Frank Stella, to the optical intensity of painters such as Bridget Riley and Jan Van der Ploeg. Artists creating phenomenological encounters with light, colour and architecture such as James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson also became the touchstones for Zora’s electric and charged practice. She synthesizes artificial fluorescent and neon light with natural colour fields sampled from the changing landscape in the places she inhabits, from Berlin and Karsruhe to Tianjin and recently, Fremantle.
The PS Space, a raw warehouse built in 1907, which has been a car park and now art space and music venue, is a fitting backdrop to Zora’s new body of work. Like the remnants of a (pretty amazing) disco, her geometric paintings, florescent tube installations and diagonal wall mural are scattered around the vast industrial cavern. A hexagonal shape painted in blue, yellow and pink with a black triangle and a trilogy of small diamond shaped canvases punctuate the space like flashback fragments from a really great night of dancing. The nightclub could be thought of Zora’s second studio, where the artist surveys a spectacle of light and sound, where lights strobe and coloured lasers geometrically cleave through smoke machines. When you think back to an all-night clubbing session, it was once pulsing kinetically with people, light and movement – truly immersive. In the aftermath, all you can recall is the retinal inflection of light hitting the back of your eyeball in time to the beat of an anthem you can't remember. Similarly, Zora Kreuzer’s practice describes the perceptual synthesis of electric and natural, the merger between leaving the nightclub and facing the bare morning: a last glance inside at the strobing black light before you emerge, bleary-eyed and squinting at the milky, pastel sky backlit by the rising sun. Zora Kreuzer’s Laser Paradise creates an event horizon where your whole eye, mind and body are engaged, but it’s just not so hard to wake up the next day.
Leigh Robb
Curator, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts
Laserparadise, PS Artspace
Fremantle, Australia
[1] Daylight, Bobby Womack, 1975
[2] The full title of the oil painting by the English painter J.M.W. Turner (c.1775–1851) is Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) – The Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843).
Nightcall
Zora Kreuzer works with colours. Her medium is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength between 380 and 760 nanometres, in other words: light, light perceivable for us. Kreuzer does not restrict herself to a single material but uses among others acrylic paint, pigment, wall paint, and of course direct light, mostly in the form of fluorescent tubes. Her colour palette spans the entire visible spectrum, although she specialises in neon colours. In her works Kreuzer not only explores the properties of the colours themselves, experiments with their intensity, the tonal value, the nuances and the temperatures of single colour shades, but deals especially with the combination and arrangement of colours and what effect they have in the room or on the wall.
In what way does our seeing change when we enter a room immersed in red light? How much more intense does the green light shining in from the adjacent room appear to us?
In Zora Kreuzer’s light rooms, the walls, ceiling and floor become flexible image carriers. She intervenes subtly in space, mixing light and thus colour, so that in smooth transitions a plurality of shades emerges which due to one’s own movement and length of stay in the room always vary in their appearance.
Perceptual-physiological effects like flickering colours (through the juxtaposition of high-contrast colours), the appearance of after-images (after a longer observation of a colour, its complementary colour becomes visible when the eyes are shut), or the perceived reduction of colour intensity through the habituation of the eye, are only a few examples of phenomena that occur repeatedly when observing her site-specific works.
For our perceptual faculties, the intense colours of the light surrounding us are a visual challenge: we perceive contrasts, depth effects and spatial properties differently, and at the same time we ourselves seem changed, just like everything that becomes visible outside of the space. What’s more is that seeing in itself is never static: the receptors in the human eye are in continual adjustment.
One could therefore describe Zora Kreuzer’s works as dynamic in a certain way, even though her artistic gesture is often minimal and also her paintings are characterised by reduced, geometric and static forms. Her engagement with light as colour and colour as material as well as her contemplations of surface and space result from a number of cultural and art historical references (illuminated advertising, pop culture, concrete painting, light art, minimal art…) and stimulate further reflection on an expanded notion of painting.
by Katharina Wendler
www.katharinawendler.com
translated by Matthew Burbidge
Fremantle, 2014
Morning After the Deluge
I’m just getting in when everyone is getting up.[1]
The relationship between light and painting is one of the most ardently pursued by artists throughout history. Tracking sunset and tracing twilight on canvas kept Canaletto in business and Turner on his toes, the latter obsessively repainting the Morning After the Deluge [2] in a bid to properly convey the waxing dawn. He wanted to achieve a luminescence in oil, capture that headiest of optical contrasts between the strata of orange as it gently expands on the horizon and the first gasp of blue it brings with it. The searing intensity of the west coast sunset and the subtle diffusion of light as the sun rises over the ocean inform the ‘neon pastel’ palette and colour field paintings of Zora Kreuzer. But it’s also what happens between dusk and dawn, inside the laser paradise of the nightclub, that the works find their meaning.
Zora Kreuzer grew up in Bonn, Germany, but moved to Berlin when she was 10 years old and started clubbing in the late 90s, a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her coming of age was in the wake of the infamous underground rave scene, the height of the iconic Love Parade festivals and the second wave of electronica and techno in the early 2000s. It was the turn of the century and a time of up-scaled laser light shows in industrial warehouses. Berlin was truly established as the techno capital during a time of unification across East and West, where ideas of synthesising were as much social as they were musical and conceptual.
The club scene was and continues to be like a synesthetic installation for Zora, where sound expresses colour and light is sonorised. These perceptual reference points fed into an expanded painting practice when Zora went to art school in Karlsruhe. There she connected with the concrete, hard edge and colour field artists of the 60s including Frank Stella, to the optical intensity of painters such as Bridget Riley and Jan Van der Ploeg. Artists creating phenomenological encounters with light, colour and architecture such as James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson also became the touchstones for Zora’s electric and charged practice. She synthesizes artificial fluorescent and neon light with natural colour fields sampled from the changing landscape in the places she inhabits, from Berlin and Karsruhe to Tianjin and recently, Fremantle.
The PS Space, a raw warehouse built in 1907, which has been a car park and now art space and music venue, is a fitting backdrop to Zora’s new body of work. Like the remnants of a (pretty amazing) disco, her geometric paintings, florescent tube installations and diagonal wall mural are scattered around the vast industrial cavern. A hexagonal shape painted in blue, yellow and pink with a black triangle and a trilogy of small diamond shaped canvases punctuate the space like flashback fragments from a really great night of dancing. The nightclub could be thought of Zora’s second studio, where the artist surveys a spectacle of light and sound, where lights strobe and coloured lasers geometrically cleave through smoke machines. When you think back to an all-night clubbing session, it was once pulsing kinetically with people, light and movement – truly immersive. In the aftermath, all you can recall is the retinal inflection of light hitting the back of your eyeball in time to the beat of an anthem you can't remember. Similarly, Zora Kreuzer’s practice describes the perceptual synthesis of electric and natural, the merger between leaving the nightclub and facing the bare morning: a last glance inside at the strobing black light before you emerge, bleary-eyed and squinting at the milky, pastel sky backlit by the rising sun. Zora Kreuzer’s Laser Paradise creates an event horizon where your whole eye, mind and body are engaged, but it’s just not so hard to wake up the next day.
Leigh Robb
Curator, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts
Laserparadise, PS Artspace
Fremantle, Australia
[1] Daylight, Bobby Womack, 1975
[2] The full title of the oil painting by the English painter J.M.W. Turner (c.1775–1851) is Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) – The Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843).
