Among the things cropping up in the New York art world with increasing regularity are the names, and works, of several younger painters from Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. All seem to be prone to some form of fantasy-laced, stylistically nostalgic, manually dexterous and intermittently illustrational realism. The efforts of the 30-something German painter Suzanne Kühn, seen in her first show in New York, meet many of the same criteria.
Ms. Kühn, who is from Leipzig, works with and against the devotion to nature that courses through Northern European art, from the exactitude of Dürer to the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich and beyond. Her dark primeval forests, more drawn then painted, are deftly rendered in a restricted palette of black, white and several shades of green. They feature the traditional elements: towering oaks, shimmering, magically white mountains and lots of detailed undergrowth.
But everything is oddly spiked and slanted and in motion. In front of her images the wild calligraphy of Chinese landscape painting can come to mind, along with German woodcuts, Disney cartoons, the visionary graphic style of Charles Burchfield, old fashioned wallpaper and tapestry designs.
Into these situations, Ms. Kühn inserts hints of human involvement in the form of real people – a man on a mountaintop in “White Mountain,” a man with a baby carriage in “Observing the Distant Mountain” – and kitschy medallions of happy, rucksack-toting wanderers. There are also scatterings of fallen trees, stumps and logs that may or may not be due to natural causes.
In certain paintings, especially “Zweistromland,” the dissonances and inconsistencies increase, and the captivating lunacy at the core of Ms. Kühn’s sensibility comes out into the open.
Roberta Smith, The New York Times, October 1999
Last year in her first New York show, the young German painter Susanne Kühn exhibited curious hyper-Romantic yet vaguely Pop landscape canvases. This time she is showing black-and-white, ink-on-paper drawings, and the reduced palette and size give her inventive graphic vision a fine concentration.
Working neatly with homemade ink on slightly grayed pages that resemble old parchment, Ms. Kühn draws primordial wilderness scenes in an intricately linear cartoon style. Images of towering pines, craggy cliffs, dismal swamps, roaring waterfalls and radiant skies project a sublime pantheism that calls to mind the art of Caspar David Friedrich. Meanwhile Ms. Kühn’s graphic vocabulary evokes a resonant range of associations: traditional Japanese landscape painting, Art Nouveau, German Expressionist woodcuts, contemporary comic books.
Her surfaces are enthralling. She gives a different line and texture to every element in a drawing: rocks may be striated, clouds made of dots, trees silhouetted, streams formed like undulating ribbons. Still, the pictures cohere as haunting, melodramatic scenes. They are goofy – Ms. Kühn is in part satirizing Romantic clichés – but they nevertheless exude a genuinely affecting transcendentalist spirituality.
Ken Johnson, The New York Times, December 2000