Raven Row Gallery, London
Duwenhögger’s figurative paintings conjure his subjects into situations and worlds that are inventively adorned, allusive, anachronistic and compelling. As much as a painter, Duwenhögger is a designer and a fabulist. Most of his subjects are treated with love; when depicted in imaginary portraits they are poised and self-sufficient, while together, often homosocially, they seem engaged in private conversation and shared understandings. Events, allegories and narratives are dispersed over an even, democratic, picture plane. Duwenhögger’s figuration is a deliberate confrontation with high cultural mores, with an awareness of the loaded history of that form but an avoidance of heavy-handed references.
From Gallery website
The works of this German artist, who has lived in Istanbul since 2000, have a distinctive Ottoman sensibility, both sunlit and sinister: a superficial queer theatre of languorous fabulousness, shot through anxiety. The settings are fluid, moving from an operatic nineteenth century into a gilded 1930s and on. It always seems to be the afternoon, waiting to see what the evening will bring. Individually, the works suggest dreams; collectively, they hint at an unspoken history of persecution and betrayal.
There is a special delight in seeing Duwenhögger in the Georgian, domestic elegance of Raven Row. As you climb its four floors, as the scale of the galleries contracts, the paintings take on a more vivid intimacy. An installation on the top floor, ‘Probleema’, hangs five small works in a wooden shed: four men around a table in the midst of some kind of argument look across at four individual paintings of men in the street seen from behind. As in a lot of Duwenhögger’s works, the tensions – sexual, political, cultural, temporal – are strung across the room like wires. One of the most overt works is the model ‘The Celestial Teapot’, a ludicrous ‘proposal for a memorial site for the persecuted homosexuals of National Socialism in Berlin’. At the top of a tower, and surmounted by a conch shell, the titular vessel has human arms: one hand on hip, one limply waving. However you are memorialised, Duwenhögger reminds us (you might become a park, you might become a teapot), elegance and frivolity are absurd and can come at a terrible price.
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