New Year, New Shows: January Openings in Cologne
Cologne is fully covered in snow! The frosty winter wonderland didn't stop me from seeing art shows though, so I bring to you dreamy jungles, woven tarot cards, and unhinged jelly watercolors.
Josef Achrer: Escapology
Josef (Millenial, Czech) is lowkey sick of it. Buzzwords, relevance, hype. Instead of reacting to the world, he creates his own. The word Escapology is just about that: An idea of escaping into something else, be it art or touching some grass. His mostly large-scale paintings are windows into worlds where everything is a bit less exhausting. Spray-painted palm trees sway, swamps silently pull in drowning buildings, night sky and daytime exist within the same surface divided simply by forms. He stains his canvases from behind, accepting the uncertain result he’ll get on the front. He layers one color of paint on top of another, a bottom layer of crimson red peaks out from underneath a pine green. Sometimes Josef arranges his motives in grids and shapes mimicking architectural forms.
A swimming silhouette pops up time and time again. A coral red tree and salmon pink mountains frame a beautiful glossy blue pretending to be a sky in Escapology No. 8 (2023). An arm and half a head are enough to turn a sky into a lake. Josef’s brightly saturated color palette reminds me of 20th-century fauvism.
Besides painting, Josef works with photograms. Unlike photos where you project an image onto a photosensitive surface, photograms don’t require a camera. You place whatever you like on photosensitive paper, expose it to light, and it will keep the silhouettes. Josef uses stencils, cotton, sawdust, and whatever fits his vision to create surreal high-contrast black-and-white landscapes. While the large-scale photogram Searching for Shelter No.2 (2021) looks heavily Sebastião Salgado (*1944, Brazilian) coded, the smaller Searching for Shelter No. 9 (2023) reminds me of the surreal mother nature drawings by Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (Baby Boomer, Chilean).
Galerie Bene Taschen just released Josef’s newest book Escapology, available in the gallery’s online store.
Galerie Bene Taschen, open end, Lindenstraße 19, 50674 Cologne
Thomas Renwart: Shelter From The Storm
Thomas (Millenial, Belgian) brings together tapestry and tarot. He comes from a line of weavers, learned the craft from his grandmother, and brought it into his own artistic practice, weaving every single piece by himself in his old monastery-turned-studio in Ghent. So cottage-core.
His more than two-meter-long textiles of the Sternenkarten (2023) series hang in the gallery space like drapes in a theater. They bear mysterious symbols. Butterflies, creatures going through change, death, and rebirth. Planets ready to reveal your fate in a reading. They are framed by woven curtains, columns and texts as if taken from the cover pages of a 18th-century alchemy book.
Thomas has worked with flowers on several occasions already, drawing on old botanical illustrations. In his Nothing really Matters (2023) series, poppy blossoms known as symbols of death are set against a pitch-black background and offer shelter to more butterflies whose wings are as pale as if hit by a camera flashlight. Cryptic messages and mysterious images intertwine in this witchcraft seance.
Thomas Rehbein Galerie, until March 9, 2024, Aachener Straße 5, 50674 Cologne
Nikolas Müller: Gut gebrüllt, Löwe
Nikolas’ (Millenial, German) watercolors look like gummy bears left to melt in the sun. The flow of bright saturated colors contradicts his often uncanny motives: A guy stands next to a hibiscus flower his size, seemingly ignoring the three unnamed graves close by. A breast-egg hybrid squirts a liquid next to a stroller surrounded by something looking like sour gummy snakes. A red pacifier worm and a blue beermat sperm float in a blank tunnel. A manga girl flexes her enormous biceps, pharmacy and gyros snack bar signage spelled across her pink body… oh and there is an outlined garden gnome seductively lying in a corner.
It’s impossible to tell for sure what’s going on in these liquid fever dreams. Childhood memories and comic book stickers are smacked onto paper as if they will bring any clarity into this tentacula landscape chaos. Professionally speaking, slay.
kjubh Kunstverein, until February 24, 2024, Dasselstraße 75 50674 Cologne
If you want to keep up with exhibits in Cologne, I recommend downloading the Köln Galerien App or following @koelngalerien on Instagram.
I hope you enjoyed my selection of Cologne’s art January. I’d appreciate you leaving a like or comment on this review, and as always, please share!
See you soon!!!
Jennifer
The Gen Z Art Critic