Peter Kalkhof

17 January - 16 February 2002


"A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings." 1

Artists trajectories arise out of and are guided by specific historical situations. Peter Kalkhof's aesthetic trajectory was profoundly affected by his immediate situation as a post-war refugee in Germany, and then by his subsequent 'life-chance' as an artist in Britain.

I first met Peter in 1960 at the Slade School of Fine Art where we were both students. Little did we know then that we would be destined to work to-gether in the Department of Fine Art at the University of Reading for over thirty years. His art is invested in a variety of ways in the vibrant utopianism of the sixties, the period when he came to maturity as an artist. However the roots of that investment lie deep in European soil, in what Robert Rosenblum called the Northern Romantic tradition that embraces Caspar David Friedrich, Kandinsky, Malevich and the Russian constructivists.

A problem for European culture has been its relation to its "Other." It was that other, in the guise of Oriental and Islamic art and culture that became Peter's life-long passion, shared and fostered by his travels with his late wife, the Javanese jeweller, Jeanne The. They shared an understanding of the unity and variety of global culture, and of the need (now more than ever) to establish the sense that we must live and believe in one world.

Peter's work projects a deeply felt belief in the univocity of art, as the manifestation of what philosophers refer to as the 'univocity of being' which finds its expression in the differentiated multiplicity and variety of both natural and the cultural forms. This is a theme to be found in Oriental cultures, particularly in the philosophical thinking and geometric art of Islam. Like the sacred geometry to be found in these cultures, Peter's painting provides an image for thought. Univocity is imaged in his use of unitary forms and repetition as well as in his colour, in which the multicoloured light of the spectrum is absorbed into the absolute opacity of black and the purity of white. These themes of unity, multiplicity, repetition, replication and difference demonstrate a characteristically metaphysical strain emanating from his cultural origins and appear in a variety of modalities throughout his work. The present exhibition, his eighth at the Juda Gallery, proves no exception.

Roger Cook Department of Fine Art The University of Reading November 2001

1.Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, London: Athlone Press, 1994, p.304, translated from Difference et Repetition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968, by Paul Patton.

click here to read Peter Kalkhof's biography