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PHANTASTISCHE STILLEBEN AND OTHER DRAWINGS
Selected artworks from the exhibition 29 October — 22 November
2008
Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney
An exhibition of 40 artworks including recent drawings
from the ‘Fantastic Still-Life’ suite and selected works
1998–2008.
This mini-retrospective traces Kurt Schranzer’s creative trajectory
over a decade as well as presenting new work. Known for his meticulous
line drawings containing both subtle and overt homoerotic imagery,
Schranzer also presents delicate abstract compositions and whimsical
collages.
Quoted from Tracey Clement, ‘NSW Wrap’, Australian Art Collector,
Issue 46, October-December 2008, pp. 259-260
… His exhibition at Flinders Street Gallery in November,
featuring a new suite of ‘fantastic still life’ drawings
and selected drawings from the last ten years, revealed an artist
so idiosyncratic that it would be no exaggeration to call his work
unique. Although his titles happily announce debts to Klee and Ernst,
and he is a post-modern artist in the sense that his works would
be inconceivable without the foundation of Surrealist thought and
Bauhaus theories of form, his work arises from concerns that are
decidedly personal…. His main preoccupation is the male body,
and the excitements and anxieties it arouses in him. When he is
not looking directly at penises and anuses (as in the series of
nude skateboarders ‘Le Cul Mecanique’, 2006) he is seeing
them in plants and machines (‘Phantastische Stilleben’,
2008) or finding implications of them in pure abstract forms (the
smaller drawings of 1998 to 2002). The intensity of this preoccupation
can be uncomfortable for the viewer, and psychological unease comes
through in many of the works, especially the new ‘Phantastische
Stilleben’, with their unrelenting profusion of forms, none
as neutral as they first seem. A personal obsession is illustrated
in these drawings, through an intriguing series of expositions (flayed
penises in the foreground of one drawing), and sublimations (shafts
plunging through holes in the background of another), but it is
tempered by a care for beauty that ensures each drawing is handled
with restraint and intelligence. ‘Sailor from the Port of
Erotic Misery’, the title of a drawing from 2004, gives some
indication of the atmosphere of melancholy in much of Schranzer’s
work, and yet the simple joy of drawing is always present. …
Intensely intricate or artfully simple… one marvels at his
craftsmanship….
Extracted from Joe Frost, ‘Drawings: Kurt Schranzer &
Tony Tuckson’, Artist Profile, Issue 6, Autumn 2009,
p. 89
In a general way formalism represents a scientific description
of line, form and colour. In a specific way it seeks to turn form
into a fetish. Kurt Schranzer’s drawings and collages reveal
that he is a connoisseur of the relationship that binds form to
fetish. His incredibly precise and sometimes 'obsessive' works of
art constitute a boys own journey into modernism. By appropriating
mechanical drawings from early twentieth century technical manuals
and combining them with veiled references to many of the Modern
Masters including Klee, Ernst and Leger, Schranzer has developed
a diagnostic model that acts as a speculum providing an in depth
analysis of masculinity.
The language of Schranzer’s form is confirmed by its content.
Graphic images of marine life, carnivorous plants, medical equipment
and anal sphincters exist in profusion alongside one another. It
wouldn’t be difficult to imagine a traditional formalist saying
“Kurt you have gone too far” but in reality he hasn’t
gone too far because his menagerie of images has been constructed
and resolved using the steely determination, discipline and restraint
of a true formalist.
It would also be all too easy to dismiss Schranzer’s work
as the scribbling of a mannerist. What prevents this is his choice
of subject matter. Over the past decade Schranzer’s drawings
have evolved from suggestive minimalist depictions of what appear
to be inflated rubber rings in works such as 'Scrum' produced in
2001 to full blown homoerotic or more accurately homo-social images
of “skater dudes” displaying all and a little bit more
in a series of works titled 'Le cul mecanique' (The mechanical arse)
from 2006. With regard to their subject matter these works appeared
in a nick of time at Schranzer’s last solo exhibition, just
at the moment when the art world fetishisation of skateboard riders
was in full swing.
In the spirit of Luce Irigaray’s influential text 'Speculum
of the Other Woman' which aimed to critique a series of psychoanalytic
conventions including castration, penis-envy and anal eroticism
Schranzer’s work seeks to develop a diagnostic model that
simultaneously dissects and represents the paradoxical condition
of homosexual masculine desire.
Christopher Dean, The Speculum of the Other Man, exhibition
essay, 2008.
Dean is an artist and art historian living
in Sydney.
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