SUSANNE KÜHN

We are therefore thankful that painter Susanne Kühn will, for this first time, present her recent works in the exhibition FLASH, her third solo exhibition at the gallery, before they will travel to the Kunstmuseum Celle for an exhibition in March.

The exhibition presents her newest series ‘Flash Realism’ of currently nine paintings, with which Kühn directly reacts to the pandemic and its effects on our lives. And in which she also reflects her artistic work, while she has deliberately sought a rethinking of her previous artistic strategy and practice. In fact, the new paintings, which Kühn modestly calls sketches, have little in common with the large-scale and complex pictorial worlds that have dominated her work over the past decade. Instead of a dense synthesis of art-historical and pop-cultural references and personal experiences in her past paintings, executed at the highest level of craftsmanship, her new ‘sketches’ are characterised by a more light and ephemeral style of painting. As Kühn puts it, she was interested in a decidedly ‘uninformed manner of painting’, focusing to capture the immediate moment.

In her works, Kühn shows her own intimate surroundings: her studio, places in her home, rooms of family members...the personal radius of experience is limited to the everyday, immediate environment. They show deserted places, which is also new to her work. Only displays of electronic devices, that have become so important in the last year, or personal objects that look as if they have just been used, indicate the presence of human activity. And yet it is the clear directness of her colour intensive paintings that affects the viewer directly. A ray of light in the stairwell, a saucer on the tablecloth, a bookshelf hidden in darkness–it all suddenly becomes an event because Kühn paints as if she were seeing all this for the first time.

And maybe she does.

Susanne Kühn has not abandoned her previous artistic practice, but rather questions whether and how artists can work and react on times of crisis. With the series Flash Realism she also revives a painterly practice that she pursued from the very beginning of her career, a form of immediate realism. It has not caused a break in her artistic work, but rather a sort of ‘tying up loose ends’. Kühn herself is curious to see how her artistic work will further develop in the years to come. And we can be too.

A catalogue with a text by Susanne Kühn on her new series will be published to accompany the exhibition.

Please see the virtual visit at beck-eggeling.de.