Susanne Kühn: Walks & Other Stories

Susanne Kühn (born in Leipzig in 1969, lives in Freiburg) is regarded as one of the most renowned artists in the field of figurative painting in Germany. Alongside painting, drawing represents an important artistic medium for her. For the exhibition Walks & Other Stories, Susanne Kühn has produced a new series of large-format works. Here, in seemingly surreal and absurd compositions, she reflects her artistic attitude to graphics. In the course of this engagement she ponders issues such as artistic identity and creativity within a dynamic field that oscillates between etchings and cartoons, woodcuts and contemporary animation. The larger-than-life black-and-white drawings on canvas not only deliberately explode the dimensions of the exhibition space itself, but also challenge the received taxonomies of graphics, for example, the use of paper or the intimate format.

Surrounded by the powerful new large-format works on canvas, a cross-section of Kühn’s comprehensive prior output in graphics is presented horizontally in knee-high wooden boxes. Combining her ideas about nature and urbanity, vegetation and deconstruction, these small colourful landscape sketches provide the foundation for her current work. The presentational form was designed by the Belgian architect Inessa Hansch, with whom Susanne Kühn has been collaborating since 2007 on various spatially expansive objects. The pathways between the boxes effectively re-chart the space and permit different viewing angles of the drawings.

Susanne Kühn is currently a Professor of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, and lives and works in Freiburg, Germany. She has a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and continued her studies in New York at the School of Visual Arts and Hunter College. In 2002 she was awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University. Her work has been shown and appraised internationally and is represented in numerous collections.

Kerber Verlag has published a catalogue in conjunction with the exhibition containing an essay by Isabel Herda and an interview between Susanne Kühn and Charlotte Mullins (German/English, 96 pages).

Edition Copenhagen produced two lithographs on the occasion of this exhibition.

Curator: Isabel Herda, Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg