Dörte Kraft’s painterly work can be divided roughly into two categories: geometrical, representational works and expressive, abstract painting. Kraft’s oversized images generally have no beginning and no end – rather, it seems that a kind of intermittent rotation around a central point is happening within them. The painterly lines form snails, whirls and eddies from which the artist’s complex universes unfold like a kaleidoscope. But the two-dimensional canvas appears to be insufficient for the artist. Powerfully, she applies thick and pasty paint onto the canvas like a relief, so that the work slides into the apparently three-dimensional.
In her more recent paintings she also employs sand and a slightly iridescent granulate in order to create the effect of a spatial dimension. The paintings seem to have been conceived for a viewer on the move, to whom the interlacing nuances of colour become comprehensible in passing. This implies a phenomenon that is essential to Kraft – time. A specific pattern of time is implicit in her paintings through the time-consuming painting process and their endless layers and levels. In Kraft’s work we can experience time in an almost physical way as we discover ever new objects and perspectives. (Excerpt from the catalogue text by Dr. Anna Ballestrem)

In Künstlerhaus Bethanien Dörte Kraft will be showing a selection of paintings from her current work.