SUSANNE KÜHN

The black-and-white drawings combine the vocabulary of historical printmaking with digital aesthetics, thus crating a unique pictorial space for diverse narratives: young women run through a dark forest illuminated by an ominous, gigantic palette (PALETTE (2019)); or in PICUTREMAKING DISSOLVES (2019) Susanne Kühn stages herself as a medieval painter with worms slithering all over her palette where the image of Madonna dissolves into swathes of black paint.

Her new paintings CYBERPALETTE I and II, are based on a luminous yet reduced colour range that developed out of Kühn’s exploration of the idea of drawing over the past two years. Here, newly invented palette forms take on a sensuous character, seeming like floating, computer-generated organs in historically allusive spaces.

Susanne Kühn was born in Leipzig in 1969. After studying painting at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, she spent seven years in New York and Boston in the USA. There, she attended the School of Visual Arts and Hunter College New York, and in 2001—2002 she was awarded the Radcliffe Fellowship of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in Boston.

Susanne Kühn began her artistic career during the late 1990s in New York with solo exhibitions at the Bill Maynes Gallery and the Robert Goff Gallery. In 1997 Beck & Eggeling, which was in Leipzig at the time, presented Susanne Kühn’s work in Germany for the first time.

Since then the artist has participated in various exhibitions internationally, such as at the Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg; OMI International Arts Center, Ghent, NY USA; Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art, Düsseldorf; Sala Uno, Contemporary Arts Center Rome; Haunch of Venison London, UK; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, USA; and the Kunstverein Freiburg.

Furthermore, her work has been discussed in major publications such as Artforum International, Art in America, The New York Times, Art Kunstmagazin, Parnass, FAZ, Die ZEIT Magazin, and Monopol. Since 2015 Susanne Kühn has been a professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg, where she leads a painting class. She lives and works in Freiburg and Nürnberg.