Victor Kraus was deeply impressed by Rodin's nude drawings from the last twenty years of his oeuvre. „The looseness and playful easiness of his lines are wonderful“. Leafing through the elaborately illustrated catalogue „Auguste Rodin, 100 Zeichnungen und Aquarelle“ (100 drawings and watercolours), published in 1988 by Lingen Verlag, Cologne, Kraus found his inspiration and was enraptured by the beauty and quality of the works reproduced in this book.
In the year of 2012 Kraus reworked all of the 100 nude drawings from the book, partly with a pastose watercolour technique, partly making watercolour pencil drawings and also adapting them in parts to make collages. Victor Kraus describes his intention for this series as follows: „The paleness of Rodin's colours and the often poor contrasts alone, have prompted me to impose my painterly approach on these reproduced drawings. That is, in fact, to some degree quite disrespectful, but the desire to transform or even reinterpret this group of works has seduced me to commit this sacrilege."
The thus created works on paper sometimes have more, sometimes less or at times even hardly anything left in common with the original motifs, however, the soul of these drawings can still be sensed throughout. Two years later the artist transferred a few of the motifs to larger format onto canvas and cardboard. As the solitaire of a painterly paraphrase of a sculpture by Rodin he created the large format work on canvas Torso der Adele (2014).
The exhibition is accompanied by the presentation of the sculpture Baigneuse Zoubaloff by Auguste Rodin.
Installationshots
Selected works
Publications
Victor Kraus. Rodin Paraphrasen
- Artist: Victor Kraus
Editor: Ute Eggeling, Michael Beck
Text: Michael Beck - German
Softcover, 21 x 14,8 cm
64 pages, 46 illustrations - Beck & Eggeling Kunstverlag, 2014
- 6 €