The Frieder Burda Museum was founded in 1998, by a liberal act, by the homonymous collector and has a heritage of about a thousand works of modern and contemporary art. The museum is located in Baden-Baden, near the local Staatliche Kunsthalle. In autumn 2016, with a view to expand its institutional activity, the Museum Frieder Burda opened the Salon Berlin (in the former Jewish Girls’ School) in one of the liveliest artistic districts of the German capital. Closely linked to the Baden-Baden museum, the Salon is not, however, a simple “exhibition hall” that accompanies the museum program and the collection of the parent company, but, in a fully articulated way, is dedicated to the promotion of new forms of artistic expression, placing them in dialogue with the works of the collection or with past history. In this way, young artists such as Alicja Kwade or Nathalie Djurberg had the opportunity to dialogue with the works of Sigmar Polke and Willem de Kooning from the Frieder Burda Collection. Thus, each iproject, building a bridge between past and future, provides both aesthetic and conceptual ideas and reasoning.

The current exhibition (until June 5) is “Window to The Clouds”, dedicated to Matthew Lutz-Kinoy (1984, New York, lives in Paris): fot the artist  it is the first institutional solo show in Germany, curated by Patricia Kamp, director of Salon Berlin. It is made up of recent paintings, ceramics and sculptures, in which the author imagines a series of contemporary landscapes as pictorial reflections that refer to architecture or historical works. Entering the Salon Berlin, you pass through an engaging installation made up of pink wool pompoms and a pink soft carpet, elements that underline Lutz-Kinoy’s interest in the environment and perceptual overlaps. The pompoms, the primary form of a multiplied sign (the sphere as an idea of ​​the cosmos and element of a geometrically measurable enclosure), act as a filter through which the paintings hanging on the walls can be seen. Bodies, sacred and profane, appear in many of these paintings. For example, a series of these refers to “La Porte de l’Enfer” (1880-1917) by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, where about one hundred and eighty figures wriggle and writhe in its monumental setting. In “Exhausted Angel Receives an Announcement in Rodin’s Garden” (2019), Lutz-Kinoy depicts a cherub, rendered in the red color, looking upwards, while two arms extend towards the figure from the outer edge of the composition. The garden scene, framed by a Rococo-style evergreen bush, is a pictorial suggestion of the porosity between inside and outside. Like a window, the painting invites the viewer to proceed beyond the present, a bit like Kurosawa did when in “Dreams” he sucked the visitor into the painting by Vincent van Gogh.

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s additive application of acrylics, his gestural brushstroke and translucent and superimposed colors offer an exploration of depth, both in the pictorial as in the spiritual sphere.

Without exaggerating we come to think not only of Leonardo’s nuanced, but also of a narrative projection built on intertwining and stratifications, so much so that we spontaneously modify what Kafka wrote at the time, changing the subject: “Each work is peculiar and is called to operate by virtue of its peculiarity, however it must find taste in its peculiarity “.

His work, represented by the Mendes Wood DM gallery, meets many admirers and the presence of his works in the collections of FRAC Aquitaine, S.M.A.K. Gent, ADN / Bolzano and Syz of Geneva. Therefore we conclude this service wishing full success to this exhibition.

Roberto Grisancich

Info:

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy. Window to The Clouds
19/3 – 05/06/2021
Salon Berlin
Auguststr. 11-13
10117 Berlin
Tue-Thur 15.00 – 18.00
Fri-Sat 12.00 – 18.00
030 24047404
salon@museum-frieder-burda.de