Diffuse twilight, the fascinating glow of the northern lights and the all-encompassing freezing cold – winter in Iceland is uncompromising and magical in equal measure. Peter Lang confronted nature in Iceland and captured it in its essence on canvas and paper.
Peter Lang, who was born in Holzkirchen in Upper Bavaria and now lives in the Upper Palatinate, has often traveled the world in the course of his artistic career, repeatedly to the far north. In this solo exhibition, the focus is on works from Iceland. In the Icelandic winter, the weather conditions are extreme, the landscape is barren and daylight is reduced to a minimum. It is precisely this particular twilight state and the ruggedness of the island that Lang repeatedly captures in large format. In the tradition of the Impressionists, Lang, who studied free painting and graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, paints “en plein air”. He is always drawn out into nature. Here, between glaciers, waterfalls, mountains and vast plains, he can concentrate on the essentials. In his landscape paintings, the artist is not interested in depicting details. What counts for him are light moods, the feeling of vastness, the horizon and the twilight, which always holds a hint of the in-between.
The technique is remarkable. Lang’s paintings are dominated by so-called “long pixels”, a horizontal division of the canvas. This grid, which runs through the entire picture space, allows him to convey a feeling of vastness and emptiness. For this structure, Peter Lang uses an aluminum frame with thin cords, which he lays on the still damp ground of the canvas – and all this in the middle of nature. In this radical open-air painting, Peter Lang creates pictures that are bursting with power and are equally sensitive. Abstract landscape painting, serial focus but above all this all-encompassing feeling of vastness act like a pull directly into the land of geysers.