Susanne S. D. Themlitz. Exhibition view: Dentro, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2022
Enquire
Inside (the head) with your hands out
Sérgio Mah
The path of any artist can be understood as a beam of movement. Slow advances, prolonged, sudden, moments of apparent immobility, detours, torsions and setbacks. This group of works by Susanne S. D. Themlitz seems to be motivated by aspiring to a re-centering, to the inside, as the title suggests, or by a subtle but affirmative movement that concerns one of the most essential axis of her artistic practice: drawing. All that is rehearsed here is engineered from the procedural conditions of drawing, as concept and experience of form. This show includes objects, materials and mediums that are common in the artist’s creative universe, but let’s start with the large format vertical drawings, that clearly take on a programmatic role in this conceptual and display architecture.
Susanne S. D. Themlitz. Exhibition view: Dentro, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2022
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Transcription. Drift. Dispersion, 2018. Acrylic paint, graphite, ink, colour crayons and watercolour on wood. 31 x 25 cm. Unique
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Monumentornament with Rorschach spot from the series Inside, 2022. Glass, wood, ceramics. 119 x 40 x 40 cm. Unique
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Monument (bird’s eye view) from the series Inside, 2022. Glass, wood, cork, ceramics. 80 x 23 x 23 cm. Unique
Enquire
These are drawings that follow similar principles: on a white background, irregular, diaphanous (that lets you see the canvas’s mesh) and relating to matter, like a skin-layer that was added over a surface, the artist inscribes black lines and pictorial blotches, spills and colour fluxes that are not subjected to the expectation of figurative recognition. However, in the centre of every drawing we find a body, a construction (that inevitably we connect with other constructions that appear in previous works by the artist). It is the only element in these drawings that possibly refers to something that we can recognize in our world. Grotto, refuge, shelter, laboratory, an artist’s house. It is a physical structure made of a mass in permanent transmutation, a source of effluvia and reconfigurations. It is the allegory of a primordial place, or simply the metaphor for the locus where it happens and where it projects an immensely free and productive imagination, which opposes consciousness, rationality and lucidity.
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, There from the series Inside, 2022. Oil and graphite on acrylic on canvas. 20,5 x 27 cm. Unique
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Four from the series Inside, 2022. Acrylic on MDF, ceramics. 53 x 25 x 25 cm. Unique
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Four from the series Inside, 2022. Acrylic on MDF, ceramics. 53 x 25 x 25 cm. Unique
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz. Exhibition view: Dentro, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2022
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Inside. Perhaps., 2019-2022. Plaster, ceramics, wood and oil, charcoal, graphite on acrylic on canvas, on wood and on metal caps. 110 x 300 x 17 cm (open). Unique
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Inside. Perhaps., 2019-2022. Plaster, ceramics, wood and oil, charcoal, graphite on acrylic on canvas, on wood and on metal caps. 110 x 300 x 17 cm (open). Unique
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, From the island, from the series Dentro, 2022. Oil and graphite on acrylic on canvas. 41 x 51 cm. Unique
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz. Exhibition view: Dentro, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2022
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Far from the series Inside, 2022. Oil and charcoal on acrylic on canvas, 25 x 30 cm. Unique
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Silhouette, perhaps. (From the series Inside), 2022. Ceramics. 43 x 35 x 3 cm. Unique
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz. Exhibition view: Dentro, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2022
Enquire
In Susanne S. D. Themlitz’s work, drawing is a practice intimately connected to the development of idiosyncratic mechanisms between thought and imagination, therefore, a medium that allows her to explore and feed processes of oddity. Each drawing assumes a cut with the exterior. The off-field doesn’t exist. Everything is inside, in this inner world, with its singular meteorology and with the unique capacity of gathering forces, energies and vibrations that distinguish it as a peculiar reality. The artist reminds us that a work of art, as well as an exhibition, before being a segment of the world, they are a world within themselves, they make a totality. Susanne S. D. Themlitz reinforces that conviction by painting the walls of the gallery with the same colour as the floor, a blotched grey with irregular limits, with an uneven, undisciplined and porous frame.
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Cedar from the series Inside, 2022. Cedar, coral, ceramics. 171 x 36 x 21 cm. Unique
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, It stagnated (from the series Dentro), 2022. Ceramics, glass, wood. 100 x 37 x 37 cm. Unique
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, View from the series Inside, 2022. Acrylic on MDF, ceramics, oil on canvas, frame. 40 x 50 x 15 cm. Unique
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, View from the series Inside, 2022. Acrylic on MDF, ceramics, oil on canvas, frame. 40 x 50 x 15 cm. Unique
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz. Exhibition view: Dentro, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2022
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz. Exhibition view: Dentro, Galeria Vera Cortês, 202
Enquire
These drawings tilt towards reduction and subtraction. Each visual field displays a geography of pictorial inscriptions. Within the plan, things seem to be loose, isolated and separated, as if several micro events were in progress with no connection to each other, brief occurrences that were clearly artful. Between the total and its regions, we are before clusters of drawings. So, in this exhibition we will have to start with the details, the fragments, with those things that occur from a practice that articulates a bodily exercise and its mental projections. What happens in our minds and what we do with our hands, define the range of possibilities before pieces that are established in the fluidity of spontaneity, in a playful availability and in intuition. In that sense, what we see are in a way “documents” of a radical and free performance, with no outlines, immune to constrains of mediums, challenging reflexivity and technical proficiency.
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Place, 2021/2022. Oil and charcoal on acrylic on canvas. 114,5 x 187,5 cm. Unique
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz. Exhibition view: Dentro, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2022
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, Brotos, 2021. Ceramics. 33 x 27 x 26 cm; 43 x 28 x 64 cm. Unique
Enquire
The type of know-how being mustered here is of another kind. The optic is overtaken by the haptic, in order to privilege the corporeal vision. Every shape that we find here has as origin the hands, each one was manipulated and moulded by the hands (and by the utensils they use). Hands with fingers, that grab, pierce, push, knead. The result is the production of shapes that are partial, complex, torturous, mysterious, physical, fragile, volatile.
Susanne S. D. Themlitz, A few lines, a crumb, silence and a forgotten word, 2022. Oil and charcoal on acrylic on canvas. 197 x 127 cm. Uniq
Enquire
When we state that these works avoid being representations, in the sense they don’t refer to the shape of the things we know, we don’t mean to say that standing in front of these works you shouldn’t expect the experience of representation. So, we know that the practice of drawing is obviously connected to our persistent compulsion to represent, to establish continuity, nexus, perceptibilities with the world that we are used to seeing. In these drawings and sculptures we see formless remnants, things becoming other things, suspended matter in ongoing metamorphic processes. Potential shapes are projected. The vertical line foreshadows a body or a tree, sharpening the direction of gravity, the fall. The horizontal line projects the meeting with a landscape, the separation between land/sea and the sky, left and right, faraway and close. In the vertical and circular lateral movements of the charcoal and acrylic paint, we sense the movements of the earth, water streams, the strength of the wind and the softness of the clouds. The landscape, as a place and way of imagining is evoked in some of these works. This way, we are confronted with the unveiling of reference shapes, forms that insinuate future possibilities. Insinuations directed to our senses and to our capacity of making fiction. What should we see with what we are seeing?
– Inside (the head) with your hands out
Sérgio Mah (April 2022)
Susanne S. D. Themlitz. Exhibition view: Dentro, Galeria Vera Cortês, 2022
Enquire
Susanne S. D. Themlitz (Lisbon, 1968) lives and works in Cologne and Lisbon.
Visual Arts Studies between 1987 and 1995 at Ar.Co. (Lisbon), Royal College of Art (London) and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
Solo shows include: TRANSFORMATÓRIO. Themlitz & Companhia, Arquipélago Centro de artes contemporâneas (São Miguel – Azores, 2022); Dentro, Galeria Vera Cortês (Lisbon, 2022); A Marble on the Floor In the Middle of the Room, Casa da Cerca (Almada, 2021/22); Monument Moment, Porta 14 (Lisbon, 2021); Far Away. Unveiled. To the Wind., Sismógrafo (Oporto, 2020); The Still Life of Landscape, Matjö Raum für Kunst (Cologne, 2019); El silencio cerca de la línea, Ángeles Baños Gallery (Badajoz, 2019); Three Lines, a Corner Times Four. And a Landscape., Galeria Vera Cortês (Lisbon, 2018); Breath. Pause – Between Two Points, Galeria Vera Cortês (Lisbon, 2016); Le loir est rendormi, Houg Gallery (Paris, 2015).
Group shows include: Alex Serra Gallery (Cologne 2022); Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon, 2021, 2016, 2012, 2004); Culturgest (Lisbon, 2021, 2013, 2003, 2000); Apard Szenes/Vieira da Silva Museum (Lisbon, 2021, 2019, 2013, 2002); CAAB (Beja, 2021); MEIAC Museum (Badajoz, 2021); Museum Nadir Afonso (Chaves, 2020); Frank Schlag Gallery (Essen, 2020); Kunsthalle (Düsseldorf, 2019); Kulturbahnhof (Eller, 2019); Casa da Cerca (Almada, 2019); Eugénio de Almeida Foundation (Évora, 2019); The Kreeger Museum (Washington, 2018); Carreau du Temple (Paris, 2018); Oriente Museum (Lisbon, 2017); Galerina Steiner (Berlin, 2016); Rompone Kunstsalon (Cologne, 2016); Arquipélago Museum (S. Miguel/Azores, 2015); Art Museum (Huelva, 2015); MAC (Elvas, 2014); Martina Kaiser Gallery (2013, Cologne); Hans-Peter-Zimmer Foundation (Düsseldorf, 2012); Cultural Center Belém (Lisbon, 2010, 2009, 2007); Pátio Herreriano Museum (Valladolid, 2008); MACUF (A Coruña, 2008).
Institutional collections include: Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Museum, António Cachola Collection, Bordallo Pinheiro Museum, CACE, Caixa Geral de Depósitos/ Culturgest, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Carmona e Costa Foundation, Centenera Foundation, EDP Foundation, Figueiredo Ribeiro Collection, FLAD Foundation, Lisbon City Council, MEIAC Badajoz, Museum MAS Santander, Norlinda & José Lima Collection, PLMJ Foundation, Serralves Foundation and PAAM Miami.
