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A GENTLEMAN’S FANCIES
Selected artworks from the exhibition 31 August — 25 September 1999
Room 35, Sydney

An exhibition of 33 ink and collage drawings, including 1 drawing and 4 collaborative drawings (with the artist Joe Frost) produced for the limited edition book Afternoon Square, published 1997.
Project sponsored by a Pat Corrigan Artist Grant, managed by NAVA with financial assistance from the Australia Council.

Schranzer turns the coldness of the conventions of technical drawing into delights of earnest-humour. The industrial metaphors of male sexuality are pleasures of wit and innovation… innuendoes of pipe work, shafts, screws, and orifices. … Schranzer’s tongue is often firmly planted in a cheek.
Quoted from Evan Brooks, artist, unpublished essay, Sydney 1997

Technical manuals from early this century are the unlikely source material for Kurt Schranzer’s series of collages, which are at once comic and unsettling. The displaced imagery has been utilised to create diverse themes with a common visual thread — homo-eroticism collides with avian and marine motifs.
Quoted from 'Diary', Sydney Star Observer, Thursday 2nd September 1999

Schranzer finds great stimulus and excitement in using and sourcing collage. It is an exploration, a game... of memory... locating, seizing, pairing the unrelated... thinking laterally, openly, associatively. He is also intrigued by the characteristics and metaphysical qualities which are inherent within elements, but which are not operational within the source material while still in book form (a turbine, dislocated from text, is really the sea-diving-helmet of a gladiator; a pulley a bird's head). Elements are disassociated from their original contexts to cancel out the separate fields of meaning of the constitutional parts, or are rearranged so that the new form still has overtones of original meaning, giving a paradoxical vision, a displacement of meaning. This displacement assists the works in being comic or burlesque, though they also resound with more melancholic or mysterious utterances. Present, too, are erotic tensions.
Excerpt from the Press Release for A Gentleman’s Fancies, August 1999

The artworks of Kurt Schranzer (b.1965) combine line drawing with collage in a manner reminiscent of the great tradition of European graphic arts… [yet] are unlike anything you have seen before. Schranzer’s works perform a delicate balancing act. Combining severe graphic renditions of obsolescent objects and machine or electrical parts sourced from technical manuals from the early 1900s with fluent, even capricious passages of ink and pencil drawing, the artist manages to conjure up graphic representations of his silent, subliminal thoughts. Chance and the mysterious machinations of the unconscious play a big part in the final results, which are often of a sexual or highly personal nature. In a recent series of collages, for instance, the combinations of machine parts and minimal lines alludes to sexual acts and organs, while other works become prompts for thoughts about the isolation of living in an urban environment or the disappearance of nature. … he is one of the best kept secrets in Australian graphic arts.
Quoted from Benjamin Genocchio, 'Smart Art', Australian Art Collector, issue 14 October-December 2000, Sydney


KURT SCHRANZER

Exotic-Lop-Lop
1999, ink and collage on paper, 23 x 16.25 cm
Signed and inscribed front with title, date, catalogue no. MDCCCLVII
Provenance: Private Collection
Exhibited: 1999 A Gentleman's Fancies, Room 35, Sydney.

© Kurt Schranzer 2007

 

 

 

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NOTE: Due to the low resolution of computer screens, the lines of these drawings will present as pixelated.
A 'jagged' quality will be particularly evident on some diagonals and curves.