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

Online Viewing Room A moment of reflection

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, 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 beloved style, 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 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.