Oska Gutheil: The Last Kind

Exhibition Dates: September 6 - September 24, 2022

Opening: Tuesday, September 6 @ 11AM-6PM

103 Allen Street, Lower East Side

1969 is pleased to present The Last Kind, an exhibition of new paintings by Oska Gutheil in his first solo exhibition with the Gallery in their Lower East Side location. 

Gutheil’s paintings depict vibrant, strange, and liberatory worlds populated with humans and creatures alike. He embraces the weird, presenting the viewer with narratives and situations that express the fluidity of life and identity. In Spinner, two hybrid creatures that appear to be a mixture between human and spider gaze anxiously beyond the painting’s borders.

While the setting appears concrete—whimsical foliage with a multicolored sunset striped across the sky—there is still much in the painting that remains left to the imagination. In a realm so visually different from ours, how are viewers to know why these figures appear so troubled? Are they holding a conversation? Avoiding each other? 

In fact, these human-animal hybrids that populate many of Gutheil’s canvases serve as representations for the radical transformations that Gutheil’s work embodies as a whole. Wandlung, which translates directly to “transformation”, shows a marriage between the weight of lived experience and the explosive potential of figurative thought. The figure on the left appears slumped and defeated, while the abstracted fruit-inspired figure on the right towers over him, offering a banana, eye contact, and touch. 

Oska Gutheil (b. 1980, Ravensburg, Germany) received his MFA in 2007 at Universität der Künste, Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include institutional shows in Germany at Museum Kunstsammlung, Jena, (G); Övre at Kunstraum Potsdam; and Fitz Fatz Peng at Kunstverein Ulm. Gutheil is represented by Russi Klenner Galerie in Berlin. He has also had solo exhibitions at Galeria Nuno Centeno, Porto, Portugal; Mike Weiss Gallery, New York, NY; Gallery Krinzinger, Schottenfeld, Wien Austria; Angell Gallery, Toronto; and Sorry We Are Closed Gallery, Brussels, Belgium. His paintings have also been included in group exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Marburg and Marburger Kunstverein, (G); Hall Art Fondation – Schloss Derneburg (G); ASU Artmuseum, Phoenix, Arizona; Goethe-Institut, Hongkong, Hong Kong; Matsumoto City Museum of Art, Japan; Hort Family Collection, New York, NY; Albertz Benda Gallery, New York, NY; PM/AM, London, UK; and Josh Lilley Gallery, London, UK. Oska Gutheil lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

For inquiries, please contact: 

Quang Bao | e: quang@1969gallery.com

About 1969 Gallery

Founded in September 2016, 1969 is a contemporary art gallery, with two gallery spaces in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Tribeca neighborhoods. Through solo / group / external exhibitions and art fair presentations, the Gallery has cultivated the careers of its represented artists and a broader community of artists primarily devoted to painting.

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