Leipzig Artist – Contemporary Paintings by Nikolaus Kriese
Nikolaus Kriese is a German painter whose artistic practice has evolved over more than three decades. His work centers on free painting—blending gestural abstraction, figurative fragments, writing, architecture, and landscape.
His current series of works combine personal perception with motifs drawn from contemporary culture, literature, science, economics, and social developments. This often results in large-format paintings measuring two to three meters, in which color, drawing, and fragmentary visual worlds converge.
With its rich tradition and vibrant contemporary scene in painting, Leipzig serves as an interesting point of reference for engaging with contemporary art.
Contemporary Painting: Between Abstraction and the Present
The works emerge from color, movement, layering, and fragments of our present. Figurative elements meet abstract surfaces, text, architectural structures, and spontaneous painterly traces.
The paintings do not follow a rigid concept. They evolve during the creative process—from color, form, experience, and the present moment.
Motifs are captured, reworked, superimposed, or discarded. This creates visual spaces in which different times, places, and thoughts can coexist.
Recent Works
IN LOVE (2026) – oil on canvas • 200 x 300 cm
IN LOVE is a painting about the power of a feeling that sets everything in motion. Love is portrayed not as a romantic motif, but as an energetic state—intense, contradictory, charged, and full of life. Vibrant shades of red, pink, and magenta condense this energy into a pulsating pictorial space.
SAND HILL RD 1 MILE (2026) – OIL ON CANVAS • 200 X 300 CM
SAND HILL RD 1 MILE refers to the street in Silicon Valley that, more than almost any other place, symbolizes venture capital, technology, and immense wealth. Hand-painted layers of color, symbols, and fragmented imagery transform capital flows, investments, and networks into an open, almost cosmic landscape.
Hill Top House (2026) – Oil on canvas • 200 x 300 cm
HILL TOP HOUSE creates a visual space that bridges architecture, nature, longing, and shelter. The starting point is Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s estate, and its portrayal in T. C. Boyle’s novel *The Women*.
Eden (2026) – Oil on canvas • 200 x 300 cm
EDEN does not depict a lost paradise or a distant promise. Paradise is already here—open, accessible, and present. A crystal-clear mountain lake emerges between green mountain ranges, while color, symbols, and painterly gestures transform the landscape into a space of light, growth, and movement.
How It All Began (2026) – Oil on canvas • 200 x 300 cm
HOW IT ALL BEGAN revolves around the idea of the origin—that moment when light, energy, and movement give rise to the first forms of order. The painting unfolds between two poles: a deep cosmic blue and a glowing red sphere reminiscent of a supernova, a stellar core, or the beginning of a universe.
Free Painting as an Independent Practice
Free painting forms the core of Nikolaus Kriese's artistic work. It arises independently of specific commissions and evolves through individual paintings, series, and ongoing groups of works.
The focus here is less on repeating a specific style than on an open painterly language. Color, composition, memory, writing, and the present can converge within a single painting and form new connections.
Painting is not understood here as an illustration of a predetermined idea. The process itself becomes part of the work—with overpainting, breaks, spontaneous decisions, and visible traces of its creation.
Leipzig and Contemporary Painting
Leipzig has a special connection to painting. Artistic training, studios, galleries, museums, and independent art spaces shape an art scene in which painting continues to play a prominent role to this day.
In its current exhibition, the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig brings together, for example, artists from Leipzig such as Neo Rauch, Henriette Grahnert, Franziska Holstein, David Schnell, and Matthias Weischer with artists from other regions and abroad, such as André Butzer, Adrian Ghenie, Katharina Grosse, and Cornelia Schleime.
It is precisely this coexistence of different painterly approaches that makes Leipzig an interesting place to explore contemporary painting.
For Nikolaus Kriese, Leipzig is therefore a potential venue for exchange, encounters, and future artistic collaborations.
Color, Typeface, and Traces of the Present
In his recent works, text, symbols, and fragments of everyday perception are increasingly appearing alongside painterly surfaces.
Concepts, memories, and seemingly casual observations may appear alongside abstract swaths of color, figures, or architectural elements. They do not form a linear narrative, but rather an open network of different levels of meaning.
IN LOVE, 2026 is a prime example of this: intense shades of red, pink, and orange interact with line drawings, text, and a bright, almost luminous center. The monumental size of 200 × 300 cm also transforms the painting into a physical experience of color and space.
Large-Scale Painting and Space
A central focus of Nikolaus Kriese’s current work is large-format painting. Canvases measuring two to three meters alter the relationship between the painting, the viewer, and the architecture. Color becomes a physical experience, and the painting develops a presence that transcends its function as an object on a wall.
The large formats open up pictorial spaces in which gestural painting, writing, figurative fragments, and architectural structures interact directly with one another. Painting thus becomes, at the same time, an exploration of space, scale, and perception.
Artworks and Collections
Nikolaus Kriese's independent works are created in ongoing series and encompass a variety of formats, including monumental paintings.
Individual works are held in private and institutional collections. Upon request, additional information regarding current series of works and individual pieces can be provided to collectors, galleries, curators, and art enthusiasts.
In-person viewings of the artwork and studio visits are available by appointment.
THE SOURCE (2026) – OIL ON CANVAS • 170 X 170 CM
THE SOURCE condenses origin, transition, and transformation into an energetic pictorial space. A ship, water, oil, and implied figures appear as elements of an ongoing metamorphosis, while the triangle, as a metaphysical principle of order governing the flowing movement, contrasts with a geometric structure.
Between One’s Own Perspective and the Art-Historical Context
The development of one’s own artistic language does not occur in isolation from history. Painting is always, in part, an engagement with images that already exist—with art-historical traditions as well as with contemporary visual culture.
Nikolaus Kriese combines a classical, traditional artistic training with an increasingly free, process-based style of painting.
The point here is not to carry on a particular school or movement. Rather, the crucial question is what possibilities painting still holds today: as an immediate medium, as a material process, and as an independent form of perception.
About Nikolaus Kriese
Nikolaus Kriese has been working as a painter since 1995. After attending the Wettin Art Boarding School, he completed an apprenticeship as a theater painter at the Erfurt Theater and in Berlin.
His practice, spanning more than three decades, combines free painting with experiences drawn from theater, architecture, and international artistic projects.
His current works range from abstraction to representational art. They are characterized by gestural swaths of color, layers, text, and figurative and architectural fragments.
Lives and works in Erfurt, Germany.
Artistic Exchange in Leipzig
Nikolaus Kriese is open to engaging with galleries, curators, collectors, artists, and institutions in Leipzig.
The focus is on current bodies of work, exhibitions, and potential artistic collaborations, as well as dialogue about contemporary painting and its place in the present.
For more information about our work and projects, please feel free to contact us directly.
