Work on Paper
47 drawings, pencil and ballpoint pen on paper, in aluminum frame (artist frame)
[…] Housed in identical mirror-frames conceived by the artist, all of the works in this series are based on the same prototype: a pencil sketch by Piet Mondrian. The first exhibition, last November in Cologne, comprised 50 pencil and ballpoint pen drawings. From this group Krebber selected 47 works for a new presentation at Art Basel Unlimited. Krebber, in an interview conducted in 2012, confirmed that he uses painting as a filter. This laconic remark, it would seem, points to one of the central aspects of his art. A filter can be described as a set of rules used to distinguish between an inside and an outside. Whatever obeys these rules passes through the filter, and the exceptions to them are blocked. Unwilling to perform such distinctions directly, Krebber operates instead based on rules borrowed from other artists. In Flat Finish, Mondrian serves as such a filter. The binary distinction between the horizontal and the vertical constitutes the premise of Mondrian’s model: The source of his conflict with Theo van Doesburg hinged on a refusal to admit the diagonal. For the Basel presentation, Krebber has therefore excluded the exceptions to Mondrian’s cardinal rule. These are two works from the Cologne group, numbers 48 and 49, where the grid is oriented diagonally rather than perpendicularly to the page (in addition to a third, rule-abiding drawing, number 50). […]