Jürgen Köhler

Since the beginning of his artistic career, Jürgen Köhler (* 1954) has focussed entirely on drawing. In his figurative, situational and non-objective pictorial inventions, the artist regularly draws on relevant motifs from art history and their iconographic framework themes in order to illustrate his relationship to time and the world. In their richness of fantasy, his drawings often resemble the works of children or so-called outsiders, even if their content is characterised by myths, religiosity, eroticism and sexuality. They show signs, figures, icy nature and technoid geometries, conjure up our hidden and buried memories and thoughts and open up erratic spaces filled with metaphors and allegories. His figures do not come exclusively from the European understanding of images; they are familiar with the fascinating strangeness of Japanese woodcuts, the masquerades of mysterious rituals or scenes from the Nō theatre, which is incomprehensible to us. Yet his drawings have nothing ideological about them, no preconceived programme, no message; they are committed to the abysses of the unconscious even where they focus on so-called reality. The catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Leonhardi-Museum Dresden (20.01.-24.03.2024).