 Picknick am Zaun (Picnic at the fence), 2005 Oil on canvas, 120 x 130 cm (47,24 x 51,18 inches) Susanne Kühn Goff + Rosenthal gallery is proud to present a series of new paintings and works on paper by German artist Susanne Kühn. In her third New York exhibition of paintings, Susanne Kühn returns with an ever-more complex world taking shape on canvas. Each of Kühn's large paintings, with their deceptively straightforward titles like "Quarry" and "Anne Goes Swimming", deftly draw on traditions such as German Romanticism, Expressionism, Chinese landscape painting, Eastern and Western woodcuts and a 20th century tradition of illustration that touches comics, cartoons and Japanese anime. While this polyglot mix of styles and influences certainly makes Kühn's paintings "postmodern", Kühn manages to synthesize these diverse elements into a coherent and striking whole. One of the most innovative techniques Kühn uses is her ability to manipulate perspective - the landscape sometimes shifts and flattens dramatically. In "Steinbruch" (Quarry), perspective seems both to upend itself and turn itself inside out. Planes of wood jut out towards the viewer, a column of rock shoots upward even while it has an arrow on it pointing down, and an entire Teutonic oasis recedes in a sworl of water and opaque, shifting light. The light, too, comes form both the left and right of the painting, suggesting a god-like or supernatural state. The effect is dizzying, yet draws the viewer into this world so wholly that one is finally able to see two tiny figures on an outcropping of grass at the edge of the water. Says Kühn: "Here the quarry itself is like a reference to the circle of life in Asian scroll painting, as the manmade elements are taken over by nature and are then being re-used by people for alternate purposes. The quarry is now a place to swim." Kühn's paintings, while humane, are about contradiction and loss. They pose eternal questions of how one reconciles nature and civilization, adulthood and puberty, high and low culture (Caspar David Friedrich settings and mundane middle-class details like the dishtowel in "Picknick am Zaun", East and West. In "Anne geht Baden" (Anne Goes Swimming), the blonde, possibly German, subject is in a foreign landscape as evidenced by the t-shirt with the Japanese woodcut draped from a branch. Furthermore, she is manifestly unprepared for swimming, let alone for the wild blue water coming at her in torrents from two directions. Here again, the violence and chaos of the foreground stands opposed to the tranquil paradise receding behind. If the viewer needs a further reminder of the contradictions at work here, a half dead tree bisects the canvas vertically. "My subjects are at some kind of threshold of life, foreigners in landscapes they actually do not know, girls about to become women," says Kühn. Kühn's paintings also exist at a threshold - of different techniques and traditions. As Kühn says, the paintings are about the "sense and senseless, directed and directionless." Born in Leipzig in 1969, Kühn completed her master's of art degree in painting and graphic art at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig. Kühn was recently included in the Eastinternational exhibition at the Norwich School of Art and Design in Norwich, England curated by artist Neo Rauch and Berlin dealer Gerd Harry Lybke. Exhibition: April 22 - May 27, 2005 Goff + Rosenthal Gallery 537B West 23rd Street USA-New York, NY 10011 Telephone +1 212 675 0461 Fax +1 212 675 0534 www.goffandrosenthal.com |
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