Ilse Krohn

Ilse Krohn paints on birch panels that she prepares herself, eight or nine coats of rabbit skin glue and chalk ground, each one sanded down before the next goes on. The surface takes about three weeks to reach a state she can work with. What follows is slower still. Pigment is floated on in thin washes, allowed to settle, then abraded with wet sandpaper until only a stain remains in the tooth of the ground. A panel can carry forty such passes. None of them is visible on its own.

The paintings are usually named after conditions rather than places. Slow Weather, Nine Degrees and Falling, Haze Over the Waalhaven. Krohn is precise about this: she is not painting skies. She is interested in what happens to a flat white rectangle when it has been touched several hundred times by a hand that is trying not to leave a mark. The result reads as atmosphere because atmosphere is what accumulation looks like when no single gesture survives.

Krohn studied at the Willem de Kooning Academie and spent nine years afterwards working as a paper conservator, a period she describes as the actual education. The conservator’s instinct runs through everything: reversibility, restraint, a suspicion of anything that cannot be undone. She has said that a painting is finished when she can no longer remember which layer she is looking at.

Her work is held in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Kröller Foundation. She has been with the gallery since 2014.