Susanne Kühn, born 1969 in Leipzig, is internationally known as an outstanding protagonist of representational painting, especially for her colour-intensive large-format paintings, where she elaborates scenes drawn from the most disparate influences in science, art history, fairy tales, children's books, comics, video games, nature, and urban architecture. These influences collide in her work, stradling the border between reality and fantasy. In addition to her paintings, the artist's print works also make up a longstanding and independent aspect of her oeuvre.
Read MoreThe artist achieves the special tension characteristic of her works through the old master style precision of her observations of nature and architecture. These elements make up the framework of her scenes, allowing her to skillfully combine contemporary visual elements from the most diverse contexts of art history and popular culture. A fluid relationship unfolds between times, a temporal flow that culminates in the experimentation and interplay of all pictorial elements.While in earlier works it was mainly young women, the artist's friends and acquaintances, who populated the images, Kühn herself increasingly appears in her more recent works–a self-confident act of self-reflection as well as an assertion of one's own position as an artist. Recently, Kühn has also began to experiment with restraining her palette, sometime even to the point of leaving the images as black-and-white drawings on large-format canvases.
After studying at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Susanne Kühn lived in the USA for several years, where she studied at the School of Visual Arts and Hunter College in New York. This was followed by a Radcliffe Grant at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University. She was represented internationally by the Haunch of Venison Gallery until its closure last year. Beck & Eggeling has represented in Germany since 2013.Works by Susanne Kühn can be found in important collections in Germany and abroad, such as the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, the Museum für Neue Kunst in Freiburg, the Zabludowicz Art Trust in London, the Schwartz Art Collection of Harvard University, the Alison and Peter W. Klein Collection, the UBS Art Collection, and the Deutsche Bundesbank Collection.
Text courtesy Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art.
