Scheinwelt

Group exhibition: Peer Kriesel and David Lehmann
November 11 to December 20, 2017 at greskewitz | kleinitz | gallery in Hamburg

“How everything is so true that no one can easily save himself against his age!” noted Johann Wolfgang Goethe in a letter to his long-time friend, the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter, in 1825. He goes on to state: “Young people get excited far too early and are then swept away in the maelstrom of time; wealth and speed are what the world admires and what everyone strives for […]”. Almost two centuries later, Goethe is more relevant than ever. The beautiful appearance, the appearance of fame and modernity, has outgrown itself. The social illusion, the striving for status and the fascination with progress have become a veritable illusory world. Digitalization, fake news, unrestrained data streams and floods of news – even 200 years after Goethe, we still can’t resist our age. What appears to be true and what is only an appearance?

In their pictures, the artists Peer Kriesel and David Lehmann trace the illusory worlds that surround us and are increasingly becoming part of our reality in very different, yet haunting ways. Her works are critical, thoughtful, humorous and always surprising, demonstrating that young artists are currently turning away from the hype of formalism and the art of the glossy effect and in return creating works with social depth.

An explosion of figures that seem to push their way from the depths to the surface characterizes many of the works by Peer Kriesel, who was born in Berlin in 1979. People, grimaces, fantasy creatures – the characters in the pictures are diverse, the works themselves highly complex. In a world where the flow of information is becoming ever faster, these works represent an antithesis. This is because they require time to visually grasp the wealth of detail. The artist calls these works “hidden object pictures”, whose play with the overabundance of visual stimuli reflects our everyday environment in an abstract way. What is also reflected in these images is the contingency, i.e. the randomness of the information that reaches us. The artist never knows in advance what will happen in his pictures. He lets paint flow or splatter over the canvas and then works on the structures that emerge from the paint. This takes him far back into the history of painting. Leonardo da Vinci reported about Botticelli, an early Renaissance painter, that he threw a sponge soaked in various colors against the wall in order to use the resulting stains as a source of inspiration. The subconscious thus becomes part of the picture, imagination and fantasy essential aspects. And yet the figures have a connection to reality, which is based on the fact that the subconscious is also spun together from everyday experiences, from information picked up in passing, from snippets of news. It captures what we take in without realizing it. Especially in times of a media world of illusion that constantly surrounds us, it is probably richer and more overloaded with input than Sigmund Freud would ever have thought possible.

Peer Kriesel’s overpaintings provide an even more concrete link to everyday life. But here, too, it is about the appearance that things create. Old tickets, admission tickets, invitations and the like are painted over with filigree figures. Each of the objects tells a story, which is supplemented and expanded by further elements through the overpaintings. And leaves us, as recipients, in the dark as to whether the artist is freely fabulating here or whether it is his experiences of the respective event that he is illustrating to us in this way.

The fact that things are not always as they seem, that “when several truths, realities and fictions are superimposed, variable, associative structures emerge that can certainly contribute to the awareness of a new truth in the network of relationships between people and their environment” is also the subject of David Lehmann’s work. The master student of Valérie Favre at the Berlin University of the Arts already made a guest appearance in Hamburg in 2015. Then as now, it is not only his themes that are surprising in that they suggest an enormous philosophical foundation in the artist, who was born in Luckau in 1987, but above all the materials. At first glance, we seem to be dealing with classical painting that confidently places itself between figuration and abstraction and works with expressive areas of color from which deformed yet powerful figures emerge. On closer inspection and with recourse to the picture descriptions, it quickly becomes apparent that little in Lehmann’s painting is as it seems on a material level. Resin, dispersion, copper oxidation, gold leaf, asphalt varnish, ink, gouache, acrylic, egg tempera, oil and felt-tip pen – not all of these materials would necessarily and immediately be associated with painting… And once again we find ourselves letting our expectations influence our vision and allowing ourselves to be deceived again and again by appearances.

It is interesting to note that David Lehmann also begins the composition of many of his pictures spontaneously and draws from the unconscious. In many of his works, he also takes pure color as his starting point and arrives at completely different aesthetic results than Peer Kriesel. However, the seismographic sense for social problem zones and the need to deal with them in the experiential space of art is similar. Picture titles such as Parzival Jr., LSD (never again!), Plagiat or Vertigo, to name but a few, give an idea that David Lehmann’s pictures have it ‘in them’ in the truest sense of the word. They touch on history and culture and open up discourses on social responsibility and fundamental philosophical questions.

We cannot defend ourselves against our age, in this respect Goethe is right to a certain extent. But we can stop being blinded by appearances and ask critical questions instead. Just like the pictures in this exhibition. Before I wish you a pleasant evening, I would like to make two small comments: you may be familiar with the work of Peer Kriesel. This could be due to the fact that it was shown at the Affordable Art Fair in Hamburg last year. He is also regularly represented with exhibitions in Berlin. Some of you may have seen David Lehmann at the salon in Hamburg in 2015. Otherwise his exhibition list reads rather internationally. The list of prizes and scholarships that the artist, who now lives in Cottbus, has received since graduating in 2014 is also astonishingly extensive.
Now I wish you a pleasant evening and lots of fun discovering the exhibition!”

Anne Simone Krüger, art historian M.A.