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Florian Süssmayr 2008

February 28, 2008- March 29, 2008

Reception: February 28, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Florian Süssmayr

Nicholas Robinson Gallery

535 W 20th St

Nicholas Robinson Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by the Munich-based painter Florian Süssmayr. The painter has his roots in the social and political subculture pervasive in Germany in the 1980s. It was the culture of punk rock, drink and drugs, soccer matches, underground movies, libertarian expression, and leftist political thought. The works in the show are documentary, yet expressive, evidence of the artist’s participation in life on the fringes of bourgeois society – they are ‘realistic’ and matter-of-fact depictions of this milieu, and are executed without cynicism or irony.

Scenes of large social gatherings like Oktoberfest celebrations or punk rock concerts are juxtaposed alongside scenes of social unrest and police intervention. In the works of Süssmayr, social marginalization is never far away from civil disobedience. The exhibition also consists of portraits of women – images culled from the bland depictions of haircut possibilities displayed in cheap salons.

This penchant for the banal permeates much of the work in the show, particularly in Xcess Bar, a painting showing a Bataille-like image of graffiti on a bathroom wall. The graffiti exhorts “freedom for Christian Klar” a longtime prisoner-martyr of RAF, the reactionary political terror group that grew from Baader Meinhof. The statement champions one of the most celebrated activists of this creed, and is a clarion call to resist perceived fascism. However, this is graffiti on a bathroom wall -– a phrase likely replicated in a thousand public toilets and ignored by all.

The paintings are characterized by a reduced palette and strongly contrasting tonality – they are readable as clearly representative, yet oscillate between figuration and abstraction like the works of so many contemporary painters. They are painted with a certain looseness of handling, yet are simultaneously precise – most are based on photographs, showing the mise-en-scene without sentimentality or compromise.

In an interview with Chris Dercon, the Director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the artist said that his work “is not uninspired by Kenneth Anger, Black Flag, Stan Brakhage, Günter Brus, Nan Goldin, Monte Hellman, Throbbing Gristle, Adolph Menzel, Otto Mühl, The Ramones, John Singer Sargent and my grandfather, Joseph Süssmayr.”

“The themes are simple, perhaps even cheerless… It is something rather gloomy, aggressive, that seems to take over. And it’s about everyday, commonplace things. Most of the motifs are unspectacular. The composition is flat. No foreground. No background… I find an excerpt from my own world. It’s all a matter of seeing and recognizing.”

Süssmayr’s work has been exhibited in Germany and the United States and was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

Books and DVDs related to artists in this show

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