“I don’t need to skirt around what interests me, or embellish a topic. I like to strip it down and confront the subject. I think you can feel that.”
—Florian Krewer

Painting figures on the fringes of cities, in abject alleyways, alone or anonymous under the veil of darkness, Florian Krewer’s painting is uninhibited, immediate and raw, using his direct environment to confront ‘the tensions simmering in society’.ⁱ Young and rebellious, Krewer’s characters are in search of action, though their exact intent is left unclear. Autobiographical while also engaging with more universal notions of identity, masculinity, and violence, Krewer follows a youthful countercultural impulse through the faceless streets of his adolescence, drawing his unruly urban antiheros into being through a woozy, painterly lens.

Krewer in the city

 

Underpinned by his academic training, the boundless potential and sense of freedom made possible in the city energises Krewer’s canvases. Raised in the working-class suburbs of a small town in western Germany, Krewer left school at sixteen to work as a house painter for three years before commencing an architectural degree in Cologne. Returning to drawing during these university classes, Krewer also discovered the ‘fluid and fascinating’ process of working with paint.ⁱⁱ By 2011, Krewer had enrolled in the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied for six years under the celebrated Scottish figurative painter Peter Doig. Following his first solo exhibition Boogie Nights at the Dusseldorf-based gallery Tom Dick or Harry in 2015, Krewer joined a selection of other students from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the 2016 group show of emergent young talent, Buzz. Created during this pivotal period and included in this group exhibition, the present work highlights the profound influence of this mentorship in the maturation of Krewer’s own, highly distinctive visual language, and his combination of ‘traces of figures from previous artists […] from those of Edvard Munch and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to those of Francis Bacon and Georg Baselitz […] with elements of Doig’s knowing naïveté to form a composite informality that brims with life.’ⁱⁱⁱ

 

As with Bacon’s contorted, excessive figures who seem perpetually poised to overrun their own bodily boundaries, the protagonist here melts woozily into the softer washes of swollen, undefined forms shifting behind him, recalling Doig’s own celebration of the distinctive ‘melting quality’ of oil paint and the way it can be employed by artists ‘as a form of magic or alchemy.’^iv Simplifying expression, clarifying colour, and eliminating perspective in the creation of his vivid, luminous canvases, Krewer’s work also draws close visual comparison to American artist Milton Avery’s deceptively simple compositions, so noted for their bold zones of bright, flattened colour. Slipping seamlessly between looser, more effulgent washes of paint to passages of more heavily worked impasto, Untitled captures a strange twilight hour where things might not always be what they seem, but that anything might be possible.

“As our cities have turned into dislocated places, [Krewer’s] paintings capture the possibilities these urban spaces still offer.”
—Jonathan Anderson

Krewer’s figures emerge from his memories, friends, personal and found photographs. Drinking from a bottle concealed by a paper bag and stood at a bus stop, the hooded protagonist in Untitled avoids the viewers’ gaze. In an ambiguous gesture that could evoke celebratory revelry or a moment of introspection and modern urban alienation, the protagonist’s actions here are untethered from any clearly defined narrative context. In revisiting and rearranging elements from his life and stripping away the anchoring signifiers of place, person, and time, Krewer outlines universal tensions and emotions at the heart of his life experience: contradictions that are deeply human.

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Born in Gerolstein in 1986, Florian Krewer is known for his large-format canvases that candidly explore desire, identity and life within cities. Represented by Michael Werner, Krewer relocated from Germany to the Bronx, New York in 2020 where he continues to live and work.
   

• The Recipient of the Prix Jean-François Prat awarded by the Bredin Prat Foundation in 2022, Krewer has been subject to several international solo exhibitions including at M WOODS, Beijing (2023-2024) and the Aspen Art Museum (2023).
   

• Krewer’s work is held in significant private and institutional collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and the Pinault Collection.

 

 

ⁱ Florian Krewer, quoted in Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘Florian Krewer: flaming, fierce and vulnerable, new painting star’, Numéro, 10 January 2022, online.    

ⁱⁱ Florian Krewer, quoted in Caroline Roux, ‘Florian Krewer: ‘Painting allows me to show love and desire’’, 5 November 2021, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ Andrew Hunt, ‘Florian Krewer: Michael Werner | London, Artforum, Summer 2019, vol. 57, no. 10, online.  

^iv Peter Doig, quoted in Angus Cook, ‘Peter Doig and Angus Cook in Conversation’, Peter Doig: No Foreign Lands, exh. cat., Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, 2013, p. 193.