“Florian Süssmayr shows (2024):” is the artist’s tenth solo exhibition at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle. The German painter, who was born in Munich in 1963 and recently moved to Genoa, is presenting new works created in Italy for the first time.
Half- and full-body portraits of various – sometimes seemingly strange – individuals, deserted forest areas, nocturnal streets, a rearing horse, desire, police presence. Set pieces with a cinematic touch are spun over a narrative arc into a picture story that takes place in a subtly wicked milieu. We seem to become witnesses to a crime story that unfolds before our eyes and whose exact narrative content we have to discover for ourselves based on the clues and protagonists presented to us. As recipients, we are thus actively and inevitably involved in the narrative creation process.
This content-related impression is reinforced by the artist’s painting style. Oscillating between photorealism, gestural abstraction and impressionistic borrowings, the artist is able to create a complex interplay of light and shadow with a few, yet decisive, strokes and omissions, as well as with the help of a restrained color palette, which ultimately leads to an immersive atmospheric composition. The soot-black depth of the forest seems to draw us in hypnotically, while the abstracted surrounding flora triggers a subtle feeling of unease.
The seemingly peripheral becomes the main protagonist and individual images are assembled cinematographically to form pieces of evidence: a characteristic that fundamentally underlies all the works in Süssmayr’s œuvre. The artist, whose roots lie in the political and cultural underground of the 1980s, uncovers the traces of everyday human life in an archaeological manner and preserves their imperfection and authenticity in oil. Social deviance, the subcultural and the everyday are his themes and determine the often art-historically referencing motifs of his interiors, still lifes, scribbles, crowds and (self-)portraits.
Before becoming a painter, Florian Süssmayr worked as a lighting designer and cameraman in the film industry. He organised his first exhibition with architectural images from Beirut in 1999. His first institutional solo exhibition took place in 2005 at the Haus der Kunst Munich and the Lenbachhaus, since then he has exhibited in various galleries in Munich, Zurich, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Cologne and Berlin. Most recently, his works were shown as part of the exhibition “Unkempt Paintings. German Art since 1960 from the Collection of Duke Franz of Bavaria” at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and at the Lenbachhaus in Munich as part of the exhibition “Fragment of an Infinite Discourse”. Miltach Castle dedicated a comprehensive solo exhibition to the artist in 2022. (Y. Kaiser)
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