HANS KOTTER Luminous Infinity

Hans Kotter is an expert in dealing with colour and light. In his third solo exhibition, the Berlin-based German artist shows a selection of light installations and expansive kinetic light objects of the past years at Galerie Michaela Stock. His visualisation and aesthetic staging of light refraction and virtuous colour compositions convey overwhelming impressions in every sense of the word. Hans Kotter is a magician when it comes to the illusion of sensually experiencing space through light effects. For more than 20 years, he has exclusively shown light art, specialising in fluorescent lighting and LED, in most cases designed strictly geometrically, always subsumed in thematic series.

Again and again, Hans Kotter’s hanging or free-standing light objects reflect the coming together of materiality and immateriality, and the aspects of reality and virtuality, time and space immediately associated with it. The surroundings are reflected in the polished surfaces of the light objects made of metal or spy glass, thus becoming part of the light sculpture themselves. Light and movement can barely be separated from one another since light is defined as energy moving in waves, which, on its way through space, is absorbed or reflected depending on the object’s surface texture. Plastically structured, transparent or reflective surfaces turn into iridescent or vibrating fields of light.

Through these variable constellations, Kotter seduces the recipient to “new vision” and to form a sensitivity and weightlessness in contemplating objects. The use of integrated, moving light sources also enhances the impression of lightness and ephemerality. The light reflections transfer the movements to the surrounding space and convey continuously changing impressions. But it is a game with illusion, with the apparently endless, constantly surprising and astonishing ways to stage light and colour artistically. This extremely aesthetic and simultaneously mysterious interplay of reflecting surfaces and endless colour compositions propels the viewer into a rapture of colour and depth from which he has no desire to recover quickly.1