ASPEN ART MUSEUM Exhibitions
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In approaching Florian Krewer’s paint- ings, it’s useful to think of the psycho- analytic dictum that everyone and everything appearing in our dreams are parts of ourselves. Doubles prolifer- ate in Krewer’s pictures; as creator- observer and participant in the world he depicts, his painting process is one of the subject reflecting on himself as object. He utilizes boldly expression- istic figuration inflected with the visual language of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity)—the resurgence of figurative art in 1920s Germany that produced some of the most iconic, bewildering and affecting images of the interwar era—crossed with the flour ishes of German expressionism’s aggres- sive subjectivity. Krewer’s paintings present the contemporary moment at the height of its efflorescence and in all of its dreamlike perversity to disclose what and how we desire, and the frac- tured facets within personality, sexual- ity, friendship and domination. Yet these are not self-consciously intellectual, conceptual or historical paintings. Instead, they spring from a boyishly intuitive hand that channels innocence with the occasional lubri- ciousness of his homoerotic imagery and tableau. Marginalized bodies and social outcasts are often arranged in agglomerations, engaged in balletic dance and movement with improvisa- tory, spontaneous enthusiasm, as with in the air (2018) and everybody rise (2019). In conversation (2019), hooded figures seem to thrust out of the picture plane and parade through an assem- blage of perspectives: embodied tops, bottoms and disembodied shadows; gendered, racialized, predominantly youthful bodies; hungry and breathing bodies; suffering and humiliated bodies; and bodies in pleasure and in pain. Krewer anatomizes how the body is marked by and yields to the multi- plicities of desire, power and pleasure, tracing the dismemberment of man by largely stripping him of specific char- acteristics, time and place. He breaks down the self by splitting up the com- ponent parts and embodying them in separate figures, animals, or as doubles that often seem interred in their own separate worlds or engaged in frus- trated attempts at communion, as in camouflage (2019), pass the lights (2019), new day (2020) and dog songs (2021). In ursa minor (2021), the head of a roar- ing sun bear bursts from a mountain- ous landscape while a nude male figure bends over in the foreground, inviting the viewer to gaze upon the mass of pink skin surrounding his sex. Despite its explicit nature, the painting hardly seems intended to arouse; most viewers are more likely to regard it with disgust than erotic titillation. These personas reveal themselves as versions of the artist’s other selves, ones erupting from the unconscious and acting both anti- thetically and complementarily to his conscious mind—shadows, reflections and split dichotomies between gods and monsters, angels and ghosts, virtue and vice. In deploying the body and its politics as the site of libidinal tides and projective fantasies, Krewer is aware that it is both biological fact and social and historical idea—one that carries dissonant registers of meaning and symbolism. There is, after all, no mean- ingful individual body-ego without the social interface produced by the gaze and touch of the other. The body is both an object for others and a subject for
BODY DOUBLES
between private and public, projection and perception, surface and cavity, producing spectacle from the mental shallows of experience and memory. The conundrums of identity, agency and frustrated satisfaction are the central cruxes of Krewer’s pictures, which depict how we live in sometimes nurtur- ing, sometimes toxic, somatic and semiotic environments. He is attuned to how one’s dreams move into the reality of action, and how from action the dream may well begin again. It is an aesthetics of pure mutation, one oriented towards the future, towards the reprogramming of desire.
the self, a source and prey of power, a corporeal car which we variously augment with prosthetics and sanitize, beautify, discipline. The artist’s own body is covered in symmetrical tattoos from top to bottom, like a somatic archive or self-dissection created by the Rorschach test of his skin which has preserved, erased, scratched-out and written-over its various layers of history. “All that is outside, also is inside,” observed Goethe. The central theme that emerges in Krewer’s practice is that of relation- ships—the ways in which we live in both want and conflict with ourselves and others, and the symptoms of the divided self that can become legible through individualized despair. In the black, bleak picture captive (2020), a male fig- ure lies in bed, facing the viewer, while
a demonically deranged red-eyed panther pounces at him from behind, emerging from the walls with fangs and claws drawn. It is both a form of emotional algebra and a collaged com position of the remote distances and alienation that exists within and between subjects. (Compelling art is never about safety, but about what threatens safety.) Krewer’s portraits often convey moments of conflict, frustration, insom- nia, anxiety, violence, avoidance and frigidity, but also the artist’s attempt to make himself whole through passion and illumination. Krewer’s is a desire which is omnivorous and agnostic in orientation, articulating even a desire for his own annihilation, a desire to devour and be devoured by all. Mining what lies between binaries, he revels in the space
Above Florian Krewer, touch , 2022. Courtesy: © Florian Krewer and Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London Opposite Florian Krewer. Courtesy: The Aspen Art Museum; photograph: Josh Paige “Florian Krewer: everybody rise” is on view through September 24. Support cutting edge programming and join an exciting community of art lovers by becoming a supporter of the Aspen Art Museum. Visit our website: aspenartmuseum.org
Hiji Nam is a writer and editor. She lives in New York, USA.
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