Florian Krewer on Masculinity, Anxiety, and Desire

Florian Krewer b. 1986, Germany Follow +

From confronting the complexities of urban life to challenging societal norms, Florian Krewer paints narratives that explore themes of masculinity, anxiety, and the primal nature of desire using striking colours to evoke thought and reflection on stereotypes.

Krewer’s inaugural museum solo show in Asia, Nice Dog, runs from 2 December 2023 to 2 March 2024 at M WOODS in Beijing. The exhibition travels from the Aspen Art Museum, which hosted an iteration of the show in the U.S. earlier this year.

Ocula Advisory sat down with the German artist to discuss the influences behind the vibrant chaos of his compositions.

Your paintings beautifully depict the intensity and chaos of urban life. They feel confrontational, boundless, and charged with emotion. Where do these feelings come from?

I grew up in a relatively stereotypical and conservative household. My father left home when I was young to start another life. My social circle became my surrogate family. We were tough on the outside and shared our vulnerabilities on the inside. That was important to me, especially when growing up in a macho world.

It did not allow much room for being different, being feminine. The expected representation of oneself was tough to endure, though I believe it’s getting easier now, especially in the U.S. None of this was communicated openly, but this subliminal aggression was there. Still, my close male friends were all relatively emotionally available in private. Sometimes we use masks to make it through the world.

You can’t always be who you really are. This dialectic often appears in my work because it involves extreme resistance. And that is the case on a small scale as an individual and in general in society. It’s difficult to express yourself freely without being targeted.

I can only paint what touches me in some way, or what I experience. But the pictures themselves are not primarily about me. It’s the confrontation that I try to let flow into the picture, not a self-portrayal.

You frequently portray young men in streetwear who seem anxious and at odds with society. What draws you to them?

I think there is so much anxiety in the world and you can see how people want to escape it through drugs. When I was young, my friends told me not to touch the hard stuff, and I’m lucky for that. I saw first-hand how hard drugs can change your psyche, and thought to myself, ‘damn, I’m just not going to deal with that stuff, that’s not good for me.’ Not everyone I know made it.

Here in New York, when people have it rough, they say, ‘No, everything is fine.’ I believe it’s because the fear of being left out is so present. The constant pressure to perform is enormous.

We live in a world of clichés. We preconceive everything without even having had contact with what we fear or critique. Basically, our expectations and anticipation of what we imagine often outlast reality.

Your use of striking colours—such as searing orange, lurid pink, and neon green—contributes to the extraordinary energy of your compositions. How does your palette change depending on your mood and the environment you paint in?

It’s different from painting to painting, depending on how I experienced the subject emotionally. I try to make viewers think through the colours. Something that could look brutal at first, or strong and forceful, is perhaps just a façade, so I use colour to create a counterbalance.

Several of your paintings depict figures in liberating moments, including scenes of sexual fantasies in imagined landscapes. Why is it important to you to illustrate such primal needs and desires in your paintings?

Sex, as a primal need, has been a subject in art for centuries. It serves equally as a source of pleasure and a means of asserting power. Desire and the objectification of the body are universal; they are what makes us human.

I try to challenge the conventional stereotypes of masculinity and femininity using my personal experiences as well as my fantasies. Sex and love are not interchangeable. I try to deal with this tension and my desire to find balance in both.

What are you working on at the moment?

The exhaustion and frustration that have arisen from Covid-19 in our society are things I constantly reflect upon. You can see everywhere that we are breaking further away from basic freedoms. That’s what I think about at the moment, and it influences my work enormously, and on several levels.

The other day, I had to go to the police station and was shocked to see how many young men were taken away in handcuffs—likely for minor offences. So, I am painting that right now. I think it’s insane that so many young people are being locked up for profit. It’s a big issue in the U.S., where the profitability of this system drives criminalisation.

One of my recent paintings depicts fire-eaters, influenced by a trip to Colombia, but the image speaks to much larger issues our world faces today. The fact that climate change is ignored for money, and that money takes precedence over life is crazy. We always push everything until we burn ourselves out. —[O]

Main image: Florian Krewer switched up (2023) (detail). Oil on linen. 260.5 x 231 cm. © Florian Krewer. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London.