Susanne Kühn

Susanne Kühn represents the next generation of artists from Germany with a reemerging interest in figurative narrative abstraction. Kühn challenges the group known as the New Leipzig School that includes Neo Rauch, Matthias Weischer, Martin Kobe, David Schnell, and Christoph Ruckhäberle, by bringing her experience of living and studying in America to the fore. Kühn’s work offers painterly and formal connections between figures, landscape, and architecture through a vocabulary that is emblazed with gorgeous light and informed by German art and history. Her solo exhibition at MCA Denver presented a selection of paintings and drawings in collaboration with Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany. 

Each of Kühn’s large paintings deftly draw on traditions such as German Romanticism, Expressionism, Chinese landscape painting, Eastern and Western woodcuts and a twentieth century tradition of illustration that touches comics, cartoons, and Japanese anime. Kühn’s postmodern awareness of the multiplicity of sources permeating our everyday lives extends to every detail of her work. Her recent paintings are layered with the historic and the contemporary as she creates intensely private interiors juxtaposed with landscape exteriors that build on her past work and draw on multiple artistic traditions.

Kühn was born in 1969 in Leipzig, Germany. She completed her MA in painting and graphic art at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig, Germany. In the 1990’s she had fellowships that allowed her to live in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts where she had a Radcliffe Fellowship. She has exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum at the University of South Florida, Tampa and was included in the International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Prague in 2005. Kühn’s work is included in major museum and private collections worldwide and has appeared in numerous publications such as The New York Times, ArtForum, Art in America and Modern Painters. She lives and works in Freiburg, Germany.