Florian Süssmayr: Rental Gallery Los Angeles

The forthcoming exhibition at the Rental Gallery is part of a project initiated for a period of
one year from the summer of 2005 to the summer of 2006 by the galleries around Chinatown, inviting interesting galleries from abroad to bring new impulses to the art scene of Los Angeles.

The German artist Florian Süssmayr, born in Munich in 1963, counts among the new
German painters who are currently attracting a lot of interest in the contemporary art scene. He has had a one man show at the museum Haus der Kunst in Munich and has shown his work in Berlin and Cologne.

Following his “Travels through Germany”, commissioned by a German magazine, and his first shows in the USA at Art Basel Miami Beach and the Armory Show, New York, the Munich artist Florian Süssmayr will now be introducing his work for the first time on the Westcoast at the Rental Gallery in Los Angeles. The painter will be showing some of his large mass scenes from political and cultural contexts, and also some of his latest works that are devoted to portraiture, the theme of his early drawings and paintings, and to night scenes. The portraits are of persons unknown, rock musicians, hairdressing models, with such titles as “Salon Hairchic, Hartha” (in Saxony), and allude to the gulf between pipe dreams and reality, between glitzy glamour and the dull routine of everyday life. Other paintings have tattoos as their theme. Süssmayr’s treatment of these designs and drawings on human bodies represents a further development of his works documenting carved and scratched inscriptions on pub tables, grafitti in railway stations and underpasses. They represent the direct expression of human emotions on the fringe of the social norm. These works by Florian Süssmayr are candid snapshots of Germany. Like most of the paintings of this series, even the rushed nocturnal taxi shots show no people. Nevertheless, they document human existence in the no man’s land between misery and hope. The paintings of Florian Süssmayr operate in an urban reality that has nothing at all in common with the omnipresent images of the glittering, illusory world of advertising. 

We shall be sharing the exhibition space with IBID Projects, London / Vilnius