Contemporary Artist Los Angeles – Paintings by Nikolaus Kriese
Nikolaus Kriese is a German contemporary painter whose artistic practice has developed over more than three decades. His current work moves between gestural abstraction, figurative fragments, writing, architecture and landscape.
His paintings explore the visual and cultural conditions of contemporary life. Technology, economic systems, nature, personal experience and fragments of everyday imagery meet within complex layers of color, drawing and text.
Los Angeles provides a compelling context for this work. Few cities bring landscape, technology, architecture, entertainment and contemporary visual culture together with such intensity.
Contemporary Painting Between Abstraction and the Present
Kriese’s paintings develop through an open process of layering, drawing, overpainting and reconstruction.
Rather than beginning with a predetermined composition, each work evolves through painting itself. Figurative elements may emerge beside abstract structures; words and symbols become visual forms; landscapes can dissolve into fields of color.
The resulting paintings remain deliberately open – between control and spontaneity, observation and imagination, recognizable reality and abstraction.
Selected Works
SAND HILL RD 1 MILE (2026) – OIL ON CANVAS • 200 X 300 CM
IN LOVE (2026) – OIL ON CANVAS • 200 X 300 CM
HILL TOP HOUSE (2026) – OIL ON CANVAS • 200 X 300 CM
EDEN (2026) – OIL ON CANVAS • 200 X 300 CM
Los Angeles – Landscape, Technology and Contemporary Culture
Los Angeles is shaped by extraordinary contrasts. The Pacific landscape and surrounding mountains meet highways, architecture, film, technology and one of the world’s most influential image-producing cultures.
Its contemporary art landscape reflects this diversity. Museums, galleries, artist communities and independent spaces connect local artistic developments with international contemporary art. MOCA alone describes its collection as international in scope while maintaining particularly deep holdings in Los Angeles art.
For Nikolaus Kriese, Los Angeles is interesting precisely because these worlds cannot easily be separated. Nature exists beside infrastructure. Individual freedom encounters economic systems. Technology promises new possibilities while continuously transforming how reality itself is perceived.
These contradictions also appear throughout his current paintings.
Color as Space
Intense blues, reds, pinks, greens and luminous areas of white do not merely describe objects. They construct atmosphere and determine how a painting is experienced physically.
In IN LOVE, layers of red, pink and orange surround an almost luminous center. In other works, expansive fields of blue become spaces in which drawing, writing and figurative fragments appear and disappear.
Especially at dimensions of two or three meters, color begins to extend beyond the conventional experience of a painting and enters into dialogue with the surrounding architecture.
Technology, Capital and Landscape
SAND HILL RD 1 MILE, 2026 is a large-scale oil painting measuring 200 × 300 cm. Its title refers to Sand Hill Road in California – a place internationally associated with venture capital, technology and the economic structures surrounding Silicon Valley.
Yet the painting is neither an illustration of the technology industry nor a simple critique of it.
Writing, color, figurative fragments and abstract structures create an open field in which ideas of progress, capital, innovation and landscape overlap. The work asks what remains behind the systems and images through which contemporary ideas of the future are constructed.
California – Between Landscape and Constructed Reality
Landscape remains an important element within Kriese’s work, although rarely as traditional landscape painting.
Mountains, gardens, vegetation, architecture and imagined environments appear as fragments within larger pictorial structures.
Works such as HILL TOP HOUSE and EDEN explore the relationship between natural and constructed worlds.
This creates a particular connection with California, where spectacular landscapes exist beside some of the world’s most technologically and economically influential urban environments.
Nature and civilization are not presented as opposites. They continuously reshape one another.
Technology and the Images of the Present
Technology increasingly determines not only how people work, but how they communicate, consume images and imagine the future.
These systems leave visual traces.
Logos, words, technical references and fragments of contemporary communication enter Kriese’s paintings and become part of their structure.
In TESLA IS TESLA NOT TESLA, language itself becomes unstable. A familiar name can simultaneously refer to a historical person, a global company, technology and a cultural symbol.
The painting does not resolve these meanings. It allows them to coexist.
IN LOVE – Color and Immediate Experience
IN LOVE, 2026 creates another kind of landscape – one constructed almost entirely through color. Intense fields of red, pink and orange surround an almost luminous center. Drawing, writing and fragmented imagery appear and disappear beneath successive layers of paint.
The words “IN LOVE” remain recognizable while becoming part of the painting itself. At 200 × 300 cm, the work transforms color from a visual element into an almost physical environment.
Architecture, Scale and the Body
Los Angeles is also a city in which architecture and landscape are closely connected. Modernist houses, expansive interiors and dramatic relationships between buildings and their surroundings have contributed to the city’s visual identity. Architecture is equally important to Kriese’s large-scale paintings. Canvases measuring two or three meters fundamentally change the relationship between artwork, viewer and surrounding space. Gestures become physical, while fields of color begin to interact directly with architectural scale.
The painting is no longer simply an object on a wall. It becomes part of the experience of the room.
Large-Scale Contemporary Painting
A significant part of Nikolaus Kriese’s current practice is devoted to large-scale works. These dimensions allow individual marks, drawings and fragments to operate simultaneously at intimate and architectural scales.
From a distance, large structures and fields of color dominate. From close proximity, handwriting, drawing, corrections and traces of the painting process become visible. This tension between overview and detail is central to the experience of the works.
About Nikolaus Kriese
Nikolaus Kriese has worked as a painter since 1995.
After attending the Kunstinternat Wettin, he trained as a professional theater painter in Erfurt and Berlin from 2003 to 2006. His background combines extensive knowledge of traditional painting techniques with decades of experience working across different scales, materials and artistic contexts.
His current independent practice focuses on contemporary painting between abstraction and figuration. Gesture, writing, landscape, architecture and fragments of contemporary culture repeatedly enter the work.
Nikolaus Kriese lives and works in Erfurt, Germany, and works internationally.
Contemporary Art in Los Angeles – International Exchange
Los Angeles combines major contemporary-art institutions with galleries, artist communities and an unusually broad visual culture. Downtown alone brings together MOCA, The Broad, international galleries, independent spaces, street art and architecture.
Nikolaus Kriese welcomes dialogue with collectors, galleries, curators, architects and institutions in Los Angeles and throughout California. Information about current works, exhibitions, artistic collaborations and large-scale projects is available upon request.
