David CzuprynHe She It

Where Calder, Dalí and Herold share an app! David Czupryn (*1983) studied under Georg Herold, Lucy McKenzie and Tomma Abts in Düsseldorf. He is a master of the trompe-l’œil effect, that centuries-old art of visual deception, which in his hands is enjoying an unexpected comeback. With brush and paint he mimetically reproduces surfaces, so that handwriting and gesture are negated in a positively provocative manner. The pictures – David Czupryn works with strong harmonic contrasts and applies the paint translucently – seem to be cast from a single mould; they are not photorealistic but illusionistically three-dimensional. Arrows and other graphic elements are added to the calm grounds, standing surfaces and motifs of movement. Alongside sprawling limbs, it is broken symmetries, things falling, floating, joined, interlocked, opened and transparent that attract attention – pictures within the picture, as it were, but also set pieces that play around one another. It is no wonder that the painter admires the Surrealists, while also professing a certain fondness for Alfred Kubin. The enigmatic quality he cultivates, however, does not stand in the tradition of Dark Romanticism but recalls Alexander Calder and Naum Gabo and, of course, the roguish work of Georg Herold. David Czupryn’s pictures can thus be understood without further ado as painted installations in which Constructivism, kineticism and Surrealism celebrate an ironic resurrection. Or, to put it in today’s idiom: here Calder, Dalí and Herold share an app.

Exhibition:
Kunsthalle Darmstadt, 27/10/2018 – 6/1/2019