Frühschnee | Günter Tuzina

Slewe Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition Frühschnee by German artist Günter Tuzina. The exhibition opens on Saturday 1 March from 17:00 to 19:00 and runs until 5 April. With this exhibition, the gallery celebrates its 25-year collaboration with the artist.

The exhibition features several new paintings alongside a selection of never-before-shown works on paper from 2012 to the present. Among these are some of his earlier lithographs, which form the basis for new work. A large painting from 2002 will also be on view. It bears the title of the exhibition, Frühschnee, referring to a painting of the same name by Caspar David Friedrich. In doing so, Tuzina reflects his interest in revisiting and reinterpreting Friedrich’s romantic, idealistic spirit.

Tuzina’s highly refined paintings and drawings reveal the legacy of the minimalist idiom of the 1960s and 1970s. His rectangular paintings, rendered predominantly in dark blues, reds, and greens, resemble windows. They are intersected by expressive horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines. These lines and angles are not perfectly straight, lending the work an emotional charge and a romantic resonance. One can also clearly observe how the paintings are constructed. As Tuzina himself remarks: ‘I think it is important that you can see the traces of how something is made.’

Günter Tuzina was born in 1951 in Hamburg (DE). He lives and works in Düsseldorf. His works have been exhibited internationally and are represented in major museum and public collections. His first museum exhibition took place in the Netherlands at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in 1978, followed by a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1983. In 1985, he was invited for an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Den Haag, where he created a wall painting in the stairwell. Since then, the Kunstmuseum has collected his work over the years and organised several exhibitions, including one in 2002 accompanied by an overview catalogue of his oeuvre. He has exhibited regularly at Slewe Gallery since 2000. In 2020, Slewe Gallery, in collaboration with Salon Verlag, published an extensive catalogue titled Welt, featuring texts by Rudi Fuchs and Ulli Seegers, among others.