Philipp Haager

Philipp Haager is an established German artist whose atmospheric, mostly large-format images are produced in a lengthy process of layering countless ink glazes onto water-soaked unprimed canvases. In a stunning, finely nuanced interplay of luminescence and opacity, light-flooded pictorial spaces open up – despite the often exclusive use of black and grey tones – that display a fascinating iridescence, perhaps conveying what Haager would call a “memory of nature”. For all that his painting series, bearing titles such as “Nebula”, “Near Field” and “Haager Deep Field”, allude to the enigmatic and impenetrable, to what we as humans are not always able to readily grasp or identify, to origins and the universe, they are in fact deeply rooted in the psychological topography of a collective image memory.