Hans Kotter

Biography

Hans Kotter was born in 1966 in Mühldorf am Inn in Bavaria, Germany. Even at a young age he was enchanted by neon lights. Initially he opted for a career in photography, but when he encountered the possibilities of manipulating light and of coloured light in itself, he began to focus more and more on forming images with these elements.
In 1993 he spent a year in New York, studying at the Art Students League. Then from 2001 to 2003 he studied within the Media Design department at the Art Academy in Munich. After this period he chose to become autonomous artist and left for Berlin, where he has lived and worked as a light artist ever since.

His work quickly gained attention and has been shown at many prestigious exhibitions. Kotter’s light installations place him in a tradition of artists who have focused on working with light, movement, technology and perception. This includes Dan Flavin, Francois Morellet, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene. Hans Kotter also admires the light installations of William Turrell.

The visual and transformational qualities of light, colour, reflection and movement are central themes in Kotter’s work. From mirrors, plexiglas, stainless steel or reflective photographic colour images, he creates boxes or tubes, in and onto which light beams of varying colours are projected. Kotter focuses on their physical and artistic qualities and thus creates colourful and graphic virtual sculptures with a rhythmic structure.

How one experiences a space constantly changes due to a changing reflection of these phenomena. Both on a large and small scale, he creates works that are not so much independent from specific physical matter as they are from the perception of the spectator. In large spaces, for example, he can create a virtual sculpture of light, colour and movement or build an object of alternating lines and bars of colour. The spectator is thus placed in a dialogue of space and light in which concepts such as tangibility and infinity become relative.