Solo Exhibition, Galerie Peter Kilchmann

Spectral Paintings | 3 November — 22 December 2023 With Spectral Paintings, Galerie Peter Kilchmann Zurich features a series of new works by Swiss painter Andy Denzler. The paintings are a further evolution of his approach to create plains of imagination and projection and increase the artist’s scope by capturing transient moments rooted in our collective memory.

Solo Exhibition, Galerie Peter Kilchmann

The Goya Project | 3 November — 22 December 2023. Denzler‘s aesthetic ascription and homage to The Second of May, 1808 reveals muscled gestures yielding elongated grays blacks and whites whose striated stretch marks that aggressively tear at his canvas; gone are Goya‘s deepest of oranges and earthly browns and what remains appears desaturated like cold ashes days after a glowing fire. All as if to say that we are too late, the fire is out and the damage is done. “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men”. Andy Denzler’s work is just that, an aesthetic restatement – transgressions are irreversible but “hope” is not. His interpretation is not a trope, but a mirror reflecting multiple histories and places in which we are not active participants. I believe Denzler’s work to be portraying a new war, an existential one that pits us against ourselves. A war - of our making and one for which we must take certain responsibility. We can choose to adapt our (and not erase) collective histories and re-direct our futures.

Douglas Lewis, curator

Solo Exhibition, Opera Gallery, Geneva

The Drift | 8 – 30 June 2023
Poetic and mysterious, Denzler's paintings offer an oneiric experience, where shadows and light intertwine to create a captivating visual narrative. Through his exploration of composition and the latent ambiguity it holds, the artist takes us on a nostalgic voyage into his universe, inviting us to reflect on existential themes.

Solo Exhibition, Opera Gallery, Singapore

Between the Shadows | 25 November — 11 December 2022 Shadows play a central role in the new series. Denzler examines the space in between, the moments of empty space on the canvas surface, as a continuous exploration of what he does not see or what appears in the composition as a latent ambiguity. In this recent body of works, the abstract and the reality that arise between the subject and the object draws the viewer into the painting. In these enigmatic scenes shadow and light are essential. In the black paintings the background merges with the foreground and the shadow in between.

Solo Exhibition, Opera Gallery, Paris

Out of the Dark | 24 March — 21 April 2022 “This is the digital age that surrounds us,” Denzler offers. ”I couldn’t have painted these paintings in the past”. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said that “Art at its most significant is an early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.” Seen from that perspective, the work seems to contain genuine concerns about the state on humanity in an era dominated by technology. By working at the intersection of painting and technology he has created a hybrid oeuvre that re-asserts the expressive potential of painting as an Ageless medium that persists and asserts itself against the glut of mechanical imagery.

John Seed, author of “Disrupted Realism”

Solo Exhibition, Opera Gallery, London

Anatomy of the Mind | 3 June — 27 June 2021
Denzler’s painterly gestures shudder with uncanny, sensitive feeling rather than assert themselves with brute force, as New York School painterly gestures tend to do. However abstract his gestures seem to be, however much they can be appreciated as aesthetic and expressive phenomena in themselves, whatever representational purpose they serve, they are not raw with instinct and self-dramatizing as the gestures of the New York abstract expressionists tend to be. Pollock, de Kooning, Kline tend to make stand-alone gestures, existing for their own grand sake, whatever representational purpose they nominally serve—whatever they “suggest.” In contrast, Denzler’s gestures are empathic responses to human beings with an inner life—his basic concern. Feeling for them, he tries to fathom their feelings, conveyed through his painterly gestures. Does the fact that his paintings are lyrically tender rather than pretentiously epic like the paintings of the New York School have anything to do with the fact that Denzler is a Swiss artist rather than an American artist, that he lives and works in Zurich rather than in New York? He is seasoned in traditional European art, aware of refined Old Master portraiture as well as rough-and-ready process painting, suggesting that he is equal to the task of post-modern painting, the integration of what Baudelaire called the Grand Tradition and Harold Rosenberg called the Tradition of the New. He is thus what I have called a New Old Master.

Donald Kuspit, White Hot Magazine, New York

Solo Exhibition, Opera Gallery, Geneva

Fractured | 29 October — 21 November 2020
Denzler’s body of work places emphasis on elements of painting and erasure, gesture and removal, distortion and reality and thrives on the ambiguity between figurative and abstract, including some elements of chance. In this recent series, his visual language is asserted by leaving areas of the canvas totally bare, contrasting strongly with the paint-covered areas, thus suggesting the profound fracture this crisis has created in our society. Our everyday world has grown smaller. Cut off from people and places outside our homes, we have been forced to rediscover our immediate environment, which has become our safe haven. Denzler has portrayed the psychological states of the sitters in their intimate surroundings, as they engage in a moment of reflection and pause to introspect. Faces and bodies are abstracted through his unique painterly poetic language, mirroring our current conflicted states of being.

“I am trying to get closer to reality and experiment with how to create an emotional connection between the viewer and the subject.”

Artnet Interview, May 6, 2019

Solo Exhibition, Opera Gallery, New York

Introspection | 3 May — 18 May 2019
Swiss artist Andy Denzler offers a smattering of familiar technique and fatigued form in newfangled oil works. These eleven paintings spread laterally across the canvas in his visual language, render solitary, focal figures in moments interrupted only by horizontal, smearing brushstrokes. The edgelessness of the forms transports the bodies, garments, and furniture to a plane both aloof and haunted, neither here nor there. Denzler’s work directly responds to the coy effect of photorealism, instead invoking Jean Baudrillard’s notion of “paradise” on earth/in real-time: “Against this artificial paradise of technicity and virtuality, against the attempt to build a world completely positive, rational, and true, we must save traces of the illusory world’s definitive opacity and mystery” (1). Denzler saves traces a la Baudrillard by way of his process: composition to the end of de-composition. First, the scene is wrought, then using wet-on-wet, challenged.

Cori Hutchinson, White Hot Magazine, New York

Solo Exhibition, OVR, Opera Gallery

A Moment of Reflection | 8 May — 28 May 2020
Andy Denzler has created twelve new paintings For this exhibition, capturing human figures in their intimacy taking a moment of reflection. Denzler works in a traditional and timeless realm, and his darker paintings reminds us of those of the Renaissance Masters. He creates theatre-like settings using his personal photographs to assemble a collage which he then paints on canvas, alla prima, with multiple layers of impasto oil paint. Before the surface dries, he treats it with a spatula or a palette knife to reveal a distorted image frozen in time.

Solo Exhibition, Opera Gallery, Seoul

Paintings of Disruption | 8 November — 30 November 2019
After all, an aesthetic experience is more often found in wounds, cracks, protuberances, and creasesthan in sleekness. In other words, invasion, trauma, and contradictory movement are essential to art. According to Martin Heidegger, Artlanguage (image) originates from the act of puncturing and penetrating — or, ‘making something visible’ by opening a gap. Denzler’s studio practice is quite close to this definition of art. He literally breaks into the surface of the painting, then pushes paint around to summon sleekness on his canvas. He carves out layers of paint as if he is making a woodcut, or builds thick coats of paint on top. Eventually, his entire painting is turned into a gap, an opening that leads to somewhere else. Numerous three-dimensional collisions are overlaid on the sleek photographic image, covering the canvas like a thin veil. As the thick paint and crude brushstrokes gradually rise to the surface, the images ebb away like lifting a veil.

Park Kyum-Sook, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul

Solo Exhibition, Kunstforum Wien 

The Dark Corner of the Human Mind | 18 August — 20 September 2018
As a result of this original aesthetic, Denzler’s creations merge the figurative and the abstract. Denzler integrates figures and scenes from everyday life as captured through photography. Thus, figuration leaves room to non-figuration and all is united in a neutral palette, composed of more subdued colors such as flesh tones, ochres and browns. Denzler’s iconography is in a sense traditional. His portraits and interior scenes are reminiscent of old paintings, and depict ordinary men and women in their daily routines. Denzler paints the human figure — men and women who are anonymous and individualisedat the same time. In our world overloaded with images, such artists were able to resist to the immediacy and urgency that the new media have to offer and give their images a new temporality, allowing the viewer to reflect and contemplate. This relationship with time is reflected in Andy Denzler’s work: first in his painting process as the artist must subdue the paint before it dries; then on the canvas itself which shows its underlying layers and finally in the picture, which is striated just like on old television screens when the “pause” button was pressed on a VHS player. From one second to another, time is made to stop. Andy Denzler makes us discover the world through a different perspective. He unveils a new concrete reality. Each canvas becomes a moment suspended in time, a unique experience.

Solo Exhibition, schultz contemporary, Berlin

Breakfast With Velázquez | 21 November — 12 December 2015
The title of the show “Breakfast with Velázquez”refers precisely to a variation that Denzler painted of Diego Velázquez’ famous portrait of “Pope InnocentX” (1650). We witness, so to speak, a conversation between Denzler and the great Spaniard of the Baroque. In contrast to Velázquez, who hardly ever painted portraits of women, except perhaps the “Rokeby Venus” or “Venus with the Mirror” (1647-51), Denzler paints ten portraits of women and places his paraphrase of the Pope’s image in the center. In contrasts to Francis Bacon’s various horrific images of a screaming Innocent X, Denzler waives the macabre, creating instead soft irritation caused by the generation of a “Pope-is-pop” feeling, which can be currently found anywhere in the poorer parts of the population of many Catholic countries.

Christoph Tannert, Curator, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin

Solo Exhibition, Kashya Hildebrand Gallery, New York

American Paintings | 8 September — 8 October 2005
The fundamental experiences, that lead him to such a conclusion, may readily be retraced in Switzerland as in any other country. Reports that reflect the neocolonialist dominance of the United States over the rest of the world are omnipresent in the present day media. They confirm time and again the tendency to emulate American conservatism, particularly religiously oriented right wing radicalism elsewhere. Andy Denzler conceptualizes these ideas in the form of its emblems - from the statue of liberty to the American flag - and its representatives. He portrays these people, whose constant presence in television and newspapers is an expression of their actual power. but also the anonymous victim of such power, for example a wounded soldier of the war in Iraq. With these portraits he reaches far back into art history, but at the same time makes it notably apparent that they are conveyed through the media. A striped pattern evokes the glimmering optics of a less-than-perfect television broadcast with its movement and fuzziness. Concurrently the sepia tone gives these transformed media images the semblance of old photographs, elevated by a golden shimmer to shift the protagonists of world history into a historical frame of reference of sorts. However, we do recognize the organic earth tones that has long dominated he artist's palette. They remind us that, despite the charged political statement. we are still and anew dealing with painting, which in the service of this statement has a very particular function: Stronger than photography from which it originates, painting can in it's own ways reveal something about the character of the subject.

Martin Kraft, art critic, Zurich