Since 1992, Cornelius Völker’s oeuvre has been presented in more than 80 solo exhibitions in galleries, art societies and museums. The exhibition at the Kunstpalast is the first institutional exhibition in his native city. It comprises around 80 paintings from all of the artist’s creative periods.
Cornelius Völker (*1965) studied at the Academy of Art Düsseldorf from 1989 to 1995. He lives and works in Düsseldorf. Völker developed a powerful and richly colourful style of figurative painting in which realism and an expressive impasto technique combine to form a distinctive pictorial language. His paintings make familiar objects appear in a different light, revealing surprising facets with both virtuosity and a sense of humour.
OBJECTS
80 paintings, 760 m²
CATALOGUE
German, English, Dutch, 200 pages
Collections
Paintings Drawings & Prints
General Information
Created In
2022
Available Package Options
Turnkey
Collection and interpretation
Content only
Technical Requirements
High security
High conservation
More Details About Technical Requirements
Type of objects: Paintings, possibly drawings
Origin of the loans: Atelier Cornelius Völker, private lender NRW
Number of lenders: 5-7
Cornelius Völker is a figurative painter who consciously refers to familiar themes and motifs, but renews them in new and sometimes surprising ways by inverting them into their opposite or making them visible under aspects that have not previously appeared worthy of depiction. Völker isolates his motifs and expands the possibilities of the traditional genres of still life and portrait.
His work poses fundamental questions about the contemplation of pictures: Which object is worth painting? How large or small should an object be depicted? Under what lighting conditions is it presented?
Details in highly magnified close-up are juxtaposed with things presented sporadically in an empty colour space.
The complexity of his various pictorial inventions can be illustrated in a series of thematic sections: still lifes, paper, books, night pieces, plants, animals, women, men, body parts, weapons and drugs, waste.