130 GK In your works, we encounter human beings or animals which often inhabit a situation that seems to have fallen out of time and space. What kind of radical emptiness is this that you set resonating in your pictorial spaces? BH Yes, the animals and human beings in my pictures … They are very often alone in wide, open expanses, surrounded – as you have so nicely put it – by emptiness, which is reflected in my conception of life and poetry. I admit that there is some yearning involved here, and also continual questing. That is not to say that it is especially wonderful to be forever alone, but when painting, for example, I am always by myself, and apart from that often rapt in thought. I am simply not the type for doing things together. I love filling the empty space with colours. They express more for me than too many living creatures, and I hope that this “resonating” has its function and also finds its admirers. Of course, hurt and injury are always involved too, as for example in the picture NACHRICHT [News] from 2021. I am not someone who can react swiftly to situations, I too often have to ponder at length … My pictures are first and foremost entirely mine. What another person makes of them is, of course, in the eye and mind of the beholder … GK The emptiness is radical, but not free of content. Precisely your early works, especially the paintings, repeatedly centre around the topic of landscape. The fine play of abstraction – i.e. coloured surfaces, form and ornamentation and also figuration – holds the pictorial space together in the fullest sense of the word. Can you tell me something more about your choice of colours? The contrast of light and dark, black and white is striking, and at the same time I see a preference for cobalt- and ultramarine-violet tones and cobalt nuances in blue, turquoise and green – is that right? BH Ony very rarely do I take colours as they come out of the tube – only with certain lighter yellow tones, with carmine red, Prussian blue, and of course with black. Otherwise I prefer to mix something together. My palette is not so very large, but through mixing it becomes larger and larger … I endeavour to – or rather it just happens, as if of its own accord – take complementary colours to achieve the desired effect. As early as my student days, the Theory of Colour was one of my favourite subjects. Lovely velvety blue, ruby red cats … If you ask about the blue and green tones, these too are all – sometimes with a tiny admixture – just as the particular picture demands. I have come to take the same colour also for backgrounds, if so desired and the background is to remain visible, and on glass this works completely differently from on cardboard. That’s logical and it’s fine by me! But that doesn’t mean that I can’t be wrong. A good few panes of glass have been washed off again and again! In Conversation – There Is Always a Something and a Counterpart Gwendolin Kremer in Conversation with Beate Hornig
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