Leonhard Hurzlmeier: Kissing Shores

About

Vigo Gallery is delighted to present Kissing Shores, the first UK solo exhibition from German artist Leonhard Hurzlmeier (b. 1983, Starnberg, Germany).

Hurzlmeier’s geometric paintings posit archetypes of modern life playfully reduced to simple forms and shapes. His is an investigation into the boundaries of recognition; the extent to which an identity can be simplified while still retaining a clear sense of itself. If a portrait exists not only as a record of someone’s features, but as a representation of their character and life story, then this purposeful curtailment of narrative in his paintings reorients the essence of that existence to which we pay attention to a more generalised adhesive imagery. This process relates inversely to Renaissance portrait paintings and iconographic paintings more widely. In contrast to the former’s interest in the unique details of a certain personality, Hurzlmeier eradicates individuality from his portraits, spiritedly glossing over the struggles and hardships of his subjects with a bareness that leaves room for the viewer to project onto and flesh out their own narratives.

There’s a further, modernist underlining to these works. The preoccupation with depicting the experience and values of modern existence that emerged in the early 1900s here shifts to encompass the contemporary zeitgeist, including the rise of information technology, contemporary fashions and haircuts, increased travel, and the speed of contemporary living. There’s also an element of fantasy and simulation, with mermaids, pirates and princesses filtered into the mix of identities that form the artist’s universe. The practice through which this world forms has a geometrical underwriting, composed of orthogonal and circular lines, structured by a specific grid of cm squares. This set of parameters provides an axis on which to build seductively smooth, near-advertorial depictions of figures fishing, drinking tea, reading, or sitting quietly, with near-deprecating precision.

In Hurzlmeier’s paintings, colour is directly set against colour, with no drawn lines dividing these planes. They play into the pictorial language of illustrated posters, Modern, Medieval and Renaissance portraiture, and colour field painting; tools the artist uses in his portrayal of contemporary society. Taking these techniques for his own, he invokes a relational composition that forms as waves kiss shores.