ART CITIES:London, Lukas Duwenhögger

Some boys don’t belong in school, they’re just too strange. Lukas Duwenhögger’s paintings, collages and drawings are wild proof that he was one of those prodigious oddities that commence their careers by producing a riotous carnival of full-grown work while still in adolescence. More than 30 years later, Duwenhögger resists the confines of any temporarily illuminating scene or catchy theoretical rubric.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Raven Row Archive

“You Might Become a Park” Lukas Duwenhögger’ solo exhibition at Raven Row in London, alongside its companion exhibition “Undoolay”, which has recently ended at Artists Space in New York, is the largest and amongst the first surveys to date for the artist. Lukas Duwenhögger’s work is characterised by a reiteration of encounters between different men that embrace a moment of personal, social and sexual recognition. Posing and exchanging glances, Duwenhögger’s characters casually embrace brief instants of physical contact and implicit sexual tension. As part of his artistic strategy, Duwenhögger makes use of the insinuation as a means of communication. The insinuations and the humour indicate a will to survive under oppressive circumstances. The strength lies in ignoring reality and instead creating new imagination-inciting worlds as a promise of other possible realities. 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.

Info: Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane, London, Duration: 30/-18/9/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.ravenrow.org