Monophthong

Harald Kröner’s series “Monophthong” is loosely connected to “Yappanoise”, his first series of large-scale ink drawings. In those works, carefully balanced, flowing lines in varying shades of grey, together with folds and swarms of coloured markings, generate expansive, airy pictorial spaces with large areas of emptiness.

The works in the “Monophthong” series are smaller in scale. They originate from the cutting of a very large paper drawing, whose individual segments are subsequently further processed. Through this process, the original state of the work is deliberately dismantled and transformed: the initial drawing disperses into multiple new configurations, each carrying traces of the original whole.

At the core of the series is Kröner’s investigation into how the characteristic expanses, the long, continuous lines, and the sense of breath within the large drawings can be preserved and re-articulated within smaller formats. The title “Monophthong” reflects this idea: referring to a single vowel sound, the smallest unit of language, it becomes a metaphor for the condensation of a complex drawn space into minimal yet still resonant fragments. More