SUSANNE K†HN: New Works on Paper
November 20 - December 20, 2003
"The painter shall not paint what he sees in front of him," Caspar David Friedrich once admonished his colleagues, rather what he sees inside of him. And thereby the great Romantic transmuted his intricately detailed pictures into spiritual landscapes: landscapes from a creative mind.
Susanne KŸhn as well cultivates fictitious exteriors: marine, alpine, and sometimes simply unidentifiable crystalline. Flora that seems genetically unleashed is reminiscent of the scenery in fantasy films. The rough atmosphere, intensified by colors of almost toxic quality, gives little leeway for living creatures. Sporadically tiny figures emerge in Ms. KŸhn's drawings, which allude to the submersion of the individual with sublime nature-in the unifying sense once implored by Friedrich. But one searches in vain for Friedrich's harmony.
In By the Sea (2003) or At the Embankment (2002) these miniscule figures instill an impression of infinite alienation, upending the reference to familiar Romantic paintings with a detaching distance and irony. Nevertheless, these improbable creatures mediate between the viewer's perspective and the expanse of the landscape. They paradoxically convey openness and expansion, as in the woodcuts by Hokusai and Hiroshige. Other stylistic elements of 19th century Japanese woodcuts are seen in KŸhn's sharp outlines and finely rendered inner drawings. She mixes inks from pure pigment, water, and acrylic dispersion.
A reduced palette of black with sparse tones of blue and green underlies the graphical density of the drawings. In pictorial contrast, soft sfumato-like areas of color are washed into the composition. KŸhn uses this technique for horizons, skies, and water-elements that suggest depth, and symbolically end in the unforeseeable. Thus she adapts the allegorical potential of Japanese scroll paintings, in which stages of life are translated into landscapes.
And throughout, she portrays a longing for nature inspired by (primarily European) Romanticism that lured hikers onto mountaintops and into the woods. The resulting adventure of space and time is engraved in the motifs of the drawings: stark formulations of heights and depths and arduously restrained exaggerations of natural forms.
It is precisely these cartoon-like and drastic distortions that transform these landscapes, which Susanne KŸhn "sees inside of her," into highly contemporary works. (Susanne Altmann)