Stefanie Gutheil
menschenschattenwesending

07. - 30.03.2014

With her first solo show at Helsinki Contemporary, the Berlin-based painter Stefanie Gutheil gives us a taste of honey. Honey – the organic, fluid and warmth-inducing substance of honey, understood and seen as a symbol for the act of painting that perfectly well knows where it's coming from, and an act that just as perfectly well manages to articulate a physically and visually attractive contemporary version.

What we see is painting in action. It is taking place right here, right now, dealing with the massively overblown visual information which confronts and surrounds all of us, day in, day out. Gutheil faces this challenge head-on, and with verve. She takes no prisoners, so to speak, when and while these paintings shape the sense of reality we tremble before and deal with. When Die Stimmung is correct, nothing, nothing can beat this feeling.

This is painting as a conscious continuation of the expressive mode, taking us on a tour de force via the German masters of the 1920s and 1930s, all the way to classical painters like Hieronymus Bosch and Diego Velasquez. It is always, constantly boiling over and freezing over. It is a process that definitely stays far, far away from the closing doors of neat and tidy harmony. This is where the weirdness of the boring everyday meets scary monsters and animal-like figures: they shake hands furiously and provide fabulous connotations of imaginary conflicts – and, let us not forget, caressing acts.

They create sensualities and sensibilities that do not merely break even. They become more, much more than we could expect. Like the title of the show – menschenschattenwesending, which translates as the poetic near nonsense combination of people, shadows, essence and things – they add the sharp edge of the unknown but yet expected to the mix, the sweet and tender suspense of the things to come.

With Gutheil, these sensualities and sensibilities turn into paintings, like caterpillars that turn into butterflies, colourful and playful takes on our hybrid realities, articulating the strongly lived-through and felt co-existence of mixed worlds and sensations.

“There is a valid reason for mixing different and seemingly absurd elements with each other. This is clear in the case of painting a figure. If the figure would be, let’s say, only a human being, I would so easily get stuck in the game of representation – as in the question does it look like the type of a human being it is supposed to look like, or not. It is the honest dilemma of what is the role and place for a figure in a painting that is not abstract and not realistic. The question being: if it is not this or that, what is it then?”

“When I mix these things, and the figure of a person is a mix of human and animal tendencies and features, it is impossible to step back and question, or to think whether this is realistic or representational. It turns into something different, something else. For me, it signifies the move from illustration towards doing a painting – and doing this with the means that are available for my type of painting.”

“The idea that I have is to bring together elements and issues, whatever they are, in the visual field, and kind of force them together, carefully and caressingly – showing that at least in the realm and reality of a painting, they actually not only fit but do, in fact, really belong next to one another, that these seemingly paradoxical parts need to be and belong together.”

Quotes from a discussion between Stefanie Gutheil and Mika Hannula