Susanne Kühn’s paintings focus on an exploration of the concept of landscape painting. Imagining landscape as a threshold between nature and urbanism, the canvases range from the architectural depiction of rooms -- which open out onto the landscape -- to seemingly more traditional landscape painting and surreal abstractions of landscape.

Susanne Kühn builds up the compositions so the objects, colors and light appear one after another. Often reconstructing spaces derived from Northern Renaissance paintings, Kühn then introduces other objects such as furniture, figurines, and fabrics which reference European art history while simultaneously working on the light, creating and distorting perspective. In addition, American landscape painting and photography have influenced a number of works.

The center of Kühn’s work deals with a debate between different painterly languages and how they are influenced by light, form and space. During the painting process, the visual languages and pictorial quotations play off against each other, often raising contradictions which search for a painterly solution on the canvas. Furthermore, the ‘real’ is constantly under construction and deconstruction, leading to a new definition of the picture. Embedded in the art-historical tradition of landscape and still life painting (or the portrait, as in the 2009 series), the picture plane is a platform for the formal experimentation with space, color, structure, reality and abstraction rather than content or meaning.

Susanne Kühn studied painting at Leipzig’s School of Visual Arts. After completing her studies, she attended Hunter College and the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2002 she received a fellowship at Harvard University for the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. Her works have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Kunstverein Freiburg, The Kemper Museum Kansas, Museum fur Neue Kunst Freiburg, Norwich Art Gallery, Galerie fur Zeitgenassische Kunst Leipzig, Museum Frieder Burda, Robert Goff Gallery, Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, among others.

Kühn’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, Monopol, Art in America, ART-Kunstmagazin, Künstlerisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst, Die Zeit Magazin, FAZ.