November 20 – December 22, 2001
Leipzig-born artist, Susanne Kühn, applies the tradition of German Romantic landscape painting to surprising, new affect. “Like the 19th Century painter Caspar David Friedrich, Kühn sees nature as a metaphor for life itself, with different points in a landscape painting symbolizing various stages of the journey. Rivers, forests, mountaintops, and meadows, in other words, represent momentous events that may be distinguished by triumph as well as failure. In recognition that the human voyage can be perilous, Kühn tempers her idyllic vistas with the inclusion of hazards and disasters.” (Rubin)
While her first exhibition at the gallery regarded the notion of the wandering figure in German folklore, this time around Kühn’s imagery signifies a darker meaning—cautionary tales, whose events take place mostly at night, the paintings show the murky beauty of moonlit forests etched by coursing rivers and waterfalls. One painting in particular, taken from a true story, portrays the failure of two unglückliche British climbers to ascend the Eiger Mountain after dark.
For his first exhibition at the gallery, David Brody will create two large and elaborate wall drawings, which hint at the architectural bias of his paintings seen last season in Chelsea, but are noticeably more laconic and lapidary. Seeming at first to be computer generated, the drawings are actually derived from studies on grid paper; abstract scenes that evoke intricate sci-fi realms, or monumentally complex, extra-terrestrial cities, complete with labyrinthine passageways leading in all directions into a fractal-like infinity.