“Kerstin Wagner is a passionate painter who develops the forms, character, appeal, and effect of her paintings through her calm or spirited use of color. There are no top-heavy creation procedures; the pictures arise from dynamics and balances of movement and contemplation. She bases her paintings on the relationship between yin and yang, two complementary principles in Chinese philosophy. She views this as the division of the cosmos into negative and positive elements that together form a whole.

In her picture sequences and individual works, calm and dynamism, darkness and light, and movement and stillness are in harmony. The serene images, which are sometimes nearly monochrome, are created with pure pigments that give them a special depth through their nearly velvety surface. Kerstin Wagner sometimes works with fleeting text structures reminiscent of archaic documents and other times with areas of a lush flow of color. Sometimes her pictorial signs are delicate and subtle; other times, they are powerful and vehement. Sometimes they seem to float above the basic geometric shape of a monochrome circle. Other times, veils of color flit across light or black backgrounds. Her landscape paintings reveal an instinctive ability to capture, evaluate, and simplify realistic motifs. Kerstin Wagner likes to work in cycles dedicated to specific forms and ways of applying color. Due to her varied approaches, her body of work is diverse, creative, and consistently surprising.”

Prof. Dr. Frank Günter Zehnder