There is a new gallery at 257 Kaiserswerther Strasse, opposite Hanns H. Heidenheim's Ursus Press. It is located on the second floor of a residential building and is run by Angelika Bernutz, Klaus Rinke's sister. The trained industrial businesswoman had worked in her commercial profession for 20 years, helping her brother in 1970, first on the side and since 1983 as a permanent employee. Through him she learned so much about art and artists that she now dared to give artists a helping hand. She thinks of young people who are not yet established on the market.
The first is Peter Valentiner, a painter of French nationality who was born in Copenhagen and has been commuting between Berlin, Cologne and Paris since 1980. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Tours in the early 1960s, founded a salon there, ran a collective in Paris in the 1970s and won the Youth Biennale Prize in 1971. For a time he was a member of the committee for the Salon of Young Painters in Paris, lectured at the European Academy of Fine Arts in Trier and organised an exhibition there in 1984 on contemporary European painting.
His own art is characteristic of this kind of artistic management: he creates a kaleidoscope of painting quotations, surrounds it with ridges, scraps of stencils, edges, so that the viewer thinks he is looking at a patchwork of modern art. Painting. Cover. Start again. The gaze falls into patches of colour, is brought back by bars and ridges, contains a splendid colouring in which sounds are found to concert. When the eye has had its fill of a sonorous red sound, the next sound beckons: a transition from blue to green, with a finesse that no one will soon imitate in this young man's work. It is as if Valentiner had torn apart abstract paintings by Gerhard Richter and was now spreading them out with relish on his own canvas. He succeeds in creating a new, refined interplay (until the end of Oct.).
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