Carl Friedrich Schröer: 

 

 

AND SOMEWHERE OUT THERE, A CERTAIN MELANCHOLY

 

(…) Susanne Themlitz presents parallel worlds, vast landscapes populated by strange, straying creatures. Are these scenes from the cabinet of horrors of a comics addict, or are they dreamy memories of an admirer of medieval painting?

 

In the vastness of this fantastic landscape, human mutants, winged creatures, hydrocephaly, and organs such as brains and hearts, snails, mosquitoes, cactuses, and mushrooms create mystifying relations. The images echo the fantasy world of Hieronymus Bosch or Max Ernst’s visionary spaces. These are surreal worlds, landscapes at the end of time, which are populated by figurative and abstract visual elements that are juxtaposed as if in a collage. Realistic graphical forms appear side by side with formless color fields.

 

Susanne Themlitz works on recurring themes that arise from her own sculptures and installations. And so, almost all the pictures in this new series show giant heads on shrinking bodies. The artist works with tilting views (as seen from a frog, bird or even human perspective), distortion, compressions and distensions. The point of view is continuously displaced. The coherence of the perspective is shattered. Also the colors become autonomous, like color excrescences and clusters, or break free in a multitude of shades. Themlitz brings drawing into the realms of collage and painting with great ingenuity.

 

The absent becomes just as present as what is visibly represented. Frequently, shadows take on a life of their own. And somewhere there is a certain melancholy.