Contemporary paintings, drawings, watercolors — The Kasper König Collection – His Private Choice: Day 1
Stephan Balkenhol is a German artist known for his sculptures capturing the human form. Based in France and Germany, he specializes in wood sculptures, reliefs, drawings, and graphic techniques like lithography, woodcuts, and stencils. His distinct style features roughly carved and vibrantly painted wooden sculptures, often depicting people, animals, and architecture.
Balkenhol's subjects lack emotions, often gazing into emptiness, resulting in a distant and enigmatic aura. Wood is his primary medium, with softer woods allowing precise facial details while maintaining imperfections like chips, knots, and tool marks. The artist adds paint as a finishing touch, accentuating anatomy and vitality. The textured surfaces beneath the paint layer amplify the sense of life in Balkenhol's works.
Nicole Eisenman is French-born American artist known for her oil paintings and sculptures. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and has thrice been included in the Whitney Biennial (1995, 2012, 2019). On September 29, 2015, she won a MacArthur Fellowship award for "restoring the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century."
Paul McCarthy is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
McCarthy's works include performance, sculpture, installation, film and "painting as action". His points of reference are rooted, on the one hand, in things typically American, such as Disneyland, B-Movies, Soap Operas and Comics – he is a critical analyst of the mass media and consumer-driven American society and its hypocrisy, double standards and repression. On the other hand, it is European avant-garde art that has had the most influence on his artistic form language. Such influences include the Lost Art Movement, Joseph Beuys, Sigmund Freud, Samuel Beckett, and the Viennese Actionism.
John Wesley was an American painter, known for idiosyncratic figurative works of eros and humor, rendered in a precise, hard-edged, deadpan style. Wesley's art largely remained true to artistic premises that he established in the 1960s: a comic-strip style of flat shapes, delicate black outline, a limited matte palette of saturated colors, and elegant, pared-down compositions. His characteristic subjects included cavorting nymphs, nudes, infants and animals, pastoral and historical scenes, and 1950s comic strip characters in humorously blasphemous, ambiguous scenarios of forbidden desire, rage or despair.