Alex Katsuragawa
1989 born in Erfurt
2009 – 2010 studied painting at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design
2010 – 2016 studied multimedia Design at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design
Since 2017 autodidact painter
Lives and works in Berlin
Alex Katsuragawa’s works are characterized by a thick, impulsive application of paint. Sweeping lines, visible layers of color, and areas where material has been removed make the process of their creation tangible and point to a way of painting that follows an intuitive approach rather than a predetermined concept. Color functions not merely as a compositional device, but as a direct expression of the artist’s inner states. The processes of searching, condensing, and questioning become visible in the brushstrokes and overlapping layers, extending the figurative motif.
Skeletons, expressive studies of heads, and abstracted landscapes are recurring motifs in Alex Katsuragawa’s oeuvre. At times isolated, at others embedded within dynamic, abstract pictorial spaces, they appear as fragments of personal and collective experience. Although some of the head studies bear a physiognomic resemblance to the artist himself, they function less as specific portraits than as projection surfaces for states of remembering, doubting, and searching. Between suggestion, dissolution, and overpainting, different forms of expression emerge, raising questions of identity, vulnerability, self-perception, and the limits of human experience.
The skeletal motifs extend this exploration to questions of mortality and transformation. Set against multilayered backgrounds, they appear as part of an ongoing dialogue between life and transience, presence and absence.
This exploration continues in Katsuragawa’s most recent series, in which he takes up the motif of cornfields illuminated at night by car headlights. The motif is scratched into the layers of paint, at times resembling an exposed wound. The striking areas of white, the darkness of the surrounding space, and the wounded surface lend the image an unsettling atmosphere that inevitably evokes the threatening imagery of horror films.
It is the deliberate reduction of the visual language, together with the visible and partly chance-based handling of paint and material, that gives the works their intense emotional density. Layer by layer, surfaces emerge in which memories, perceptions, and experiences become inscribed through brushwork, ruptures in the material, and empty spaces. The works do not demand to be deciphered, but rather invite an immediate, sensory, and emotional encounter.
Lara Bader
Art Historian, Hamburg
