Cologne Gallery Hopping: Gun Powder Paintings, Lesbian Catcalling & Blue Call Boys
Here's my three current favorite gallery shows to see this fall in Cologne.
Matthias Noggler: Supergraphics
Mustard yellow large formats paintings interrupt the tight corridor layout. Matthias (Millennial, Austrian) works with gouache and color pens on canvas. Salmon pink, mint green, and anthracite grey geometrical snippets assemble into pseudo-architectural forms. It takes a few moments and steps back for me to realize that I’m actually looking at guns. Remember when Da Baby said Better not pull up with no knife / ‘Cause I bring guns to fights? Matthias took that seriously.
Surface and content conflict. First, the painting texture suggests velvety softness, while the guns should look cold and hostile. But they don’t. Second, Mattias keeps the guns rather abstract: A revolver’s cylinder might as well be a staircase, and a trigger guard doesn’t look much different than a balcony. The harsh shadows and sharp curves remind me of highways, even. You know, those 1920s/30s visions of highways and car-centered cities that promised to be the future. A vibe that I recognize in Joseph Stella’s (1877–1946, Italian-US-American) iconic The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme (1939). The perfect utopia: A whirlwind of concrete and asphalt plastering every free spot in the engineered garden of automobility!
Third, Matthias does something absolutely unexpected: Simultaneously resembling Brutalist architecture and modernist cityscapes, those guns look… goofily wobbly. No, really. One gun’s barrel dropped to the bottom as if crawling or trying to hide. One painting in the very back of the gallery squeezes in two guns facing the viewer and pressing their dark blue muzzles together. Suddenly, they look like eyes. And the guns’ stiff bodies vibrate and dissolve into floppy paper straps. They really look like paper garlands rather than metal and steel. Are those guns… shaking? Are those big, dangerous rifles scared of the tiny human in front of them? I’m close to feeling pity. Another gun in a square format looks like a spider with all its parts cramped into multiple shaky legs. A spider that targets something in front of itself, something beyond the painting, perhaps? It’s funny to think how this weapon might have heard a rattle somewhere and froze in frightened anticipation.
Matthias makes those weapons look comical. Like little fellas who are awkward about their metallic bodies, wondering how to function. So basically, he put them into puberty. Not to pull a “we live in a society”, but we really do live in times when machines act more human than humans. Or that’s what it feels like. Or what people fear.
People feared that machines would come to dominate humanity much, much earlier than when AI came around the corner. Yes, even before the Internet. Way before the 20th century, even. Can you imagine that people were concerned about new technology all the way back in the 1860s? Probably even before. But specifically in 1863, Samuel Butler (1835-1902, British) wrote a letter to the editor titled “Darwin among the Machines,” where he satirically argued that once steam engines take over as the top link in the food chain, they will be benevolent to us, just like we are to our horses and cattle. And they will take care of us, just the way we take care of the world God gave us to rule over. He says all that to go sike, let’s destroy all the machines lmao. Considering everything going on right now, that was a very valid crashout.
You might call it reactionary, but blind belief in progress is not utopian either. The Italian Futurists did not only create some sick art based on acceleration and movement as core ideals. They were also bloodthirsty warmongers who believed that war and violence cleansed humanity. That’s why most of them later came to sympathize with fascism and its radical view of social Darwinism. Unlike the visually more conservative German version, Italian fascism didn’t fight modernism. It embraced modernism and its promise of constant acceleration and evolution and applied it to their ideology and visual language.
That’s what another painting here made me think of: It’s an artificially green hillside pressed down by red, rigid walls. It reminds me of the fascist project Borgo Rizza in Sicily. Borgi were fascist settlements built in rural parts of Southern Italy and Italian colonies to “reeducate” the people that fascists deemed barbaric. Matthias made the painting look like a shaped canvas with very 70s-coded psychedelic stripes following the edges. I’d much rather be high as well than fully conscious of what’s going on.
The tech billionaire villains of Silicon Valley are the new futurists. They believe in accelerationism and progress above all else. More tech, more money, more power. Have you seen that clip of Peter Thiel (Gen X, US-American) hesitating about whether humans should survive AI? The CEO of the digital surveillance platform Palantir? A platform already used by the police of several German states and perhaps by the entire country, soon? What future do those tech bro futurists envision that makes even the machines tremble?
DREI, until October 25, 2025
Ryan Huggins: Call Boys, Pimps & Dealers
Ryan (Millennial, Trinidadian) paints nightly scenes in and outside gay bars and cafes. Although he goes for oil on linen, everything looks like gentle pastels. Blue hues dominate those settings, with some occasional red interruptions, yellow light accents, or variations of skin tones piercing through. Against the dark blue gallery walls, Ryan’s lighter blue highlights even seem fluorescent. In the shadows, the men melt into the night, becoming one with the blue darkness. In Friday Rush (2025), the bodies of three men dissolve in the very back of a bar.
Nighttime is ambiguous in art history: Society pushed its outcasts out into the night, projecting all it fears and despises into the darkness. For those labeled as outcasts, the night became a safe space. A space where they could be among themselves. Nighttime is a key motive for many queer artists. Those who can’t live out their sexuality during the day find solace in the night. It’s a natural hiding place, a veil protecting those who need it. I’m thinking of Salman Toor’s (Millennial, Pakistani-US-American) painting Night Grove (2024), a nighttime scene at a park or forest, dipped into lush green that obscures the sexual encounters happening there.
In Ryan’s rendition of Hustler Bar in Dusseldorf (2025), the mirror on the left wall only reflects half of the disco ball spinning in the center, thus turning it into a lonely, artificial crescent moon. It’s hard to imagine that those are real places in Ryan’s paintings, or at least some of those. Tabasco, Hustler Bar in Berlin (2025), mesmerized me. It pictures the outside view of the bar. With its columns and arches, it looks like an old tavern, something that doesn’t belong in contemporary Berlin. It’s much more believable that this is nothing but a stage design, considering that the only light comes from the bar entrance, the billboard around the corner, and two street lanterns. All the other windows are dark as if the rest of that area was just an empty shell.
Ryan doesn’t highlight any protagonists. Nobody seems more important than anybody else. He sketches certain features, but leaves most at a quick impression. Beyond putting the figures in relationship to one another through gestures and body language, he doesn’t outline a narrative. Even in Rent Boys, Pimps and Dealers (2024-25), it’s hard to tell which person falls into which role except for the bartender behind the counter. It’s the POV of just another visitor going to that same place on a night out.
Then there’s a shift with bright orange paintings. Ryan switches the setting to a glass cube with male dancers performing. It’s hard to understand the POV. The red curtains in Tabasco Spanish Nights (2025) suggest that I’m a voyeur standing outside. The glass in the background reflects harshly, but I can see everything clearly from my side. So am I inside with the dancers? I don’t know how to read the atmosphere in those settings, but Dancing Boy 2 (2025) surely made me feel concerned. The perspective is dizzily tilted to the left. One dancer’s expression looks surprised or even shocked. The other one frowns. They both look in the same direction at something outside the painting. The spectators don’t bother to check what’s going on. Ryan doesn’t dissolve the tension. What happens there, stays there.
Khoshbakht, until October 25, 2025
Sophia Süßmilch: Draw Me Like One Of Your French Girls (Fat, Ugly and Gay)
Do you remember how you got “the talk”? “The talk” about how babies are made? I didn’t get a proper talk. Instead, 5-year-old me was up until 4 am watching cartoons until an episode of Willi Will’s Wissen [Willi wants to know] popped up. It’s a German educational show for kids, hosted by a guy named Willi (a name that is already suspicious as fuck in itself...). And so, that motherfucker proceeded to explain to me, unprovoked and on our living room TV that my parents paid for, how men and women do the nasty to make babies. I hate that son of a bitch to this day for making me find out that way…
Why am I telling you all that? Because I love to yap, sure. But more importantly, it’s because Sophia (Millennial, German) is giving her own version of “the talk” here. As proper for the occasion, Sophia goes for flower metaphors. She takes vintage (or shall I say outdated?) 1960s canvases and paints a flower in the center of each—a very Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932, German) type move. Karl made iconic black and white photographs of plants. Very documentary, full frontal, blank background. Often, he would highlight symmetrical composition and suggest that the chosen plants had an almost architectural quality in their calculated and precise structure. Sophia adds another layer of satire by labeling the flowers by number in a Gothic font.
Botanical photography of that time also tended to an ideological framing. Stripping the plants from any surroundings and picturing them against a white backdrop erased their geographical context, which enabled colonialist thinking that disregarded local context on all levels. Moreover, botanists used to attribute human sexual organs to flower anatomy. They really tried hard to explain plant fertilization like straight sex.
That’s where Sophia chimes in. Instead of adding little busy bees pollinating the flowers to make more flowers and being submissive and breedable, she went for tiny creatures, some of which look more human than others. Multiple tiddies per body ratio, hairy skin, dark coochie lips, mouths puking sage colored rainbows. Dark boobies weigh down a figure in Better Dance Some More (2025). The veins pulse through as if she’s lifting weights at a gym. Sophia reminds everyone that she’s a Millennial, switching botanical terminology for pop song lyrics. And she rips those lines out of context just the way botanical photography uproots plants for a neat “scientific” picture. Songs like Christina Aguilera’s Genie in a Bottle (1999) that kickstarted a child star’s career as a serious, sexy woman singer who caters to the fantasies of grown men, get a new meaning in Sophia’s (ironically but kinda not ironically speaking) queer ecological dream worlds.
Sophia also added letter charm bracelets to that lil fella from the aforementioned painting. The bracelet spells the exhibition title, which is so movie-where-characters-drop-the-movie-name-in-a-conversation-coded. And do we not love that the exhibition title ironically references Titanic, one of the straightest movies in the history of cinema?
The other half of the gallery is wrapped into black curtains and adorned with white lilies like at a funeral. Instead of photographs of a deceased person, Sophia arranged Instax pics of herself and other performers. Bisexual Cockblocker and Bisexual Cuntsucker (Skies, Bodies and Empires must fall) (2025) is a portrait of Sophia lying on the floor. The polaroid format and Sophia’s perm are very much giving ‘80s yearbook picture. But the more important part is that she’s cosplaying an unseasoned chicken. This unlocked a cosmic meme reference I saw many years ago on 9GAG that claimed white people having sex looks like a chicken, and now I don’t know what to do with that.
Another Instax is titled Bromance (Hold Me Like A Mother Would Like I Always Knew Somebody Should) (2025). Sophia pulls a pietá reference, acting as Mary holding Jesus in the guise of a male performer. That part is kinda giving cheap slapstick by itself. I know that Sophia did a performance on the opening night, maybe that would have opened a deeper interpretation of those photographs.
Leaving the gallery, I see a huge four-meter-long rat tail lying in the storefront window. I will spare you the work’s 3-line-long title. A piece that was part of her viral show Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in at Kunsthalle Osnabrück. You could say it’s a fun easter egg here, perhaps. But I feel like Sophia squeezed in two shows with the appendix of a third.
Petra Martinetz, until October 24, 2025
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See you soon!!!
Jennifer
The Gen Z Art Critic
Thanks for the chicken meme 😵💫