SVEN DRÜHL
METAMODERNISM

KÖNIG TELEGRAPHENAMT
22 MARCH – 20 APRIL 2024

OPENING
21 MARCH 2024 | 6–8 PM

KÖNIG TELEGRAPHEMAMT is pleased to present, METAMODERNISM, a solo exhibition of work by Sven Drühl, consisting of three major series created between 2022 and 2024.

Drühl studied art and mathematics in the 1990s, at the height of debates around postmodernism, and out of which his practice emerged. Beginning in the 2000s, “metamodernism", or post-postmodernism, have become terms to describe the art that has followed in the wake of postmodernism. Drühl engages with these developments by taking advantage of its possibilities, developing a new style, a new metamodern visual language, by drawing simultaneously on the artistic achievements of both modernism and postmodernism.

Exhibition opening © Image by KÖNIG GALERIE

In the artist’s own words, "I believe that innovation usually arises when you rethink tradition or the existing and try to combine the individual parts in a new way or simply give everything a good shake in a DIY manner. One step back and two steps forward."

The themes that the artist repeatedly explores in his works include the transmission of cultural and media information, originality, authorship, citation, remix, seriality, as well as an interference within nature in order to alter its concepts. With the works from the “Silicone” series, Drühl refers to works by other artists for over the last 20 years, creating pictures about pictures, or second-order abstractions. Using a special technique of oil paint and silicon, the artist produces landscape motifs that place all models, whether from Romanticism or from contemporary art, into Drühl's signature style, creating a kind of pictorial remix of styles, traditions, and histories.

Exhibition opening © Image by KÖNIG GALERIE

The focus of the works included in METAMODERNISM is on Drühl's “Lacquer” series, which represents something of an inversion of the conceptual approach of the remix paintings. With the lacquer works, Drühl no longer refers to art historical models such as paintings by Janus La Cour or Caspar David Friedrich (i.e., paintings that are themselves based on a view of nature). Instead, Drühl now uses virtual templates as the source material for his paintings, which he extracts from the textured backgrounds of computerized worlds, such as those used in the gaming industry. Drühl then translates special vector files into extremely realistic-looking paintings, the result of which is a form of landscape paintings that no longer mimetically refers to an actual landscape found in nature; rather, the works consist of set pieces generated by mouse click.

According to Drühl, "From the interplay of painterly and technical steps, these very special lacquer paintings are created from various layers of paint, which are actually not paintable in the traditional sense."

Exhibition opening © Image by KÖNIG GALERIE

The lacquer paintings are complemented by 3 bronze sculptures of mountain massifs taken from the artist’s “Eroded” series: detailed plaster casts of the Matterhorn and mountainous formations of the Himalayan region. Drühl sees the bronzes as an extension of painting into space and uses hammers, chisels, and milling machines to alter these plaster casts. The results are eerily prescient, in which the partially destroyed peaks of the bronzed mountains predict the inevitable erosion yet to come. What all of Drühl's series have in common is the purposeful omission of any narrative. His landscapes appear detached, devoid of any human subjects.