Susanne Kühn, Study of Landscape

Susanne Kühn’s new series of paintings focuses on an exploration of the concept of landscape painting. Imagining landscape as a threshold between nature, urbanism and still life, the canvases range from the architectural depiction of rooms -- which open out onto the landscape through the windows -- to seemingly more traditional landscape painting. As part of the new work, Kühn juxtaposes her highly controlled painting technique with a more gestural and quickly applied process.

These new paintings closely connect to Kühn’s portrait paintings of 2009 where the focal point was on the figure. In these latest works the figures are reduced to stickmen or have disappeared completely and instead, a handful of human objects connote reference to time and scale.

Susanne Kühn builds up the compositions so the objects, colors and light appear one after another. Often reconstructing spaces derived from Northern Renaissance paintings (such as those by Robert Campin and Rogier van der Weyden), Kühn then introduces other objects such as furniture, figurines, and fabrics which reference European art history while simultaneously working on the light, creating and distorting perspective. In addition, American landscape painting and photography have influenced a number of the works, as in “Black+White Landscape on Wall,” a study of Anselm Adams’ “El Capitan.”

The center of Kühn’s work deals with a debate between different painterly languages and how they are influenced by light, form and space. During the painting process, the visual languages and pictorial quotations play off against each other, often raising contradictions which search for a painterly solution on the canvas. Furthermore, the ‘real’ is constantly under construction and deconstruction, leading to a new definition of the picture. Embedded in the art-historical tradition of landscape and still life painting (or the portrait, as in the 2009 series), the picture plane is a platform for the formal experimentation with space, color, structure, reality and abstraction rather than content or meaning.

Susanne Kühn studied painting at Leipzig’s School of Visual Arts. After completing her studies, she attended Hunter College and the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2002 she received a fellowship at Harvard University for the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. The artist's works are currently on view in a solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Lippe and a group show at the Museum Frieder Burda curated by Patricia Kamp und Jean-Christophe Ammann. They were also exhibited in 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver and in 2007 at the Kunstverein Freiburg. Kühn’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, Monopol, Art in America and ART-Kunstmagazin.

Susanne Kühn, Study of Landscape