Bernard Lokai

Bernard Lokai (born 5 September 1960 Bohumin, Czech Socialist Republic (CSR)) is a German painter. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and was student of Gerhard Richter. He lives and works in Düsseldorf and Berlin, Germany. In 2002 he began teaching at the Freie Kunstakademie Essen in Essen in the Department of Painting and Graphics.

Bernard Lokai, Neuland (unknown territiory), acrylic on canvas, 140 cm x 200 cm, 2015

Life

After his parents escaped from the former Czech Socialist Republic Lokai grew up in Düren, Germany. After the high school he began studying art at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1982. In 1987 he left as Meisterschüler of Gerhard Richter. There he met Hans-Jörg Holubitschka who became a colorfield landscape painter. Thus they have participation in several exhibitions, as "Young Figuratives"(1)

Work

Bernard Lokai, M, Landscape-Block, 18 panels, each 30 cm x 40 cm,oil on canvas, 2015

Bernard Lokai uses the historical vernacular of painting - including the gestural brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism and the spray paint of graffiti - to simultaneously absorb and disrupt traditions of landscape and abstract painting, and to explore the question of how to make a picture. His "Landscape Blocks," multi-paneled grids composed of eighteen 12 by 16 inch panels, each present an isolated 'moment' that individually appears entirely abstract. Lokai paints the small panels on an ongoing basis in the studio, without a plan for where each will fit in the overall grid. At some point he gathers all of the small canvases and chooses which to combine into a set of eighteen. He thinks of each small painting as akin to a brushstroke, such that the overall final piece is thus 'painted' by paintings. Though each panel is strikingly distinct and sometimes wildly colorful, together they coalesce into an impression of landscape.

While the landscape grids explore a different idea on each panel, the larger individual abstract paintings combine multiple concepts on the same surface, wrestling with the meaning of painting today. Each painting evolves in a reactionary process, whereby the previous brushstroke and color influence the next. The works are pluralistically composed of elements and forms that reference the historical building blocks of a century of painting conventions. The most successful pieces, in Lokai's mind, are the ones that surprise him, that arrive at a place he never imagined could exist. His purpose is neither to express emotion nor reference any particular subject. They are what they are - color, brushstroke, form, composition. Their mood may be discordant or harmonious or both. They are visceral, trans-lingual and endlessly probing. (3)

The art critic Mara Hoberman wrote about Lokai's works: "Another well-executed self-referential painting is Lokai’s Landschafts block N, 2010, in which the artist depicts eighteen land-, sea-, and sky-scapes in disparate styles quoting, in turn, the brushstrokes of Monet, Turner, and Richter (his teacher), among others." (4)

Exhibitions (selection)

References

External links

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