Two-part exhibition at Kezler Gallery echoes Warhol

One of the notable aspects of recent exhibitions at the Kezler Gallery in Southampton is that, whether by accident or design, the shows always seem to echo with an entertaining repetitiveness in a kind of rotating homage to Andy Warhol.

This is especially true of the current show, a two-part exhibition that features two new paintings by the German artist Jens Lorenzen titled “Die Mauer” (The Wall), as well as works from other gallery artists who either mimic elements of Warhol’s stylistic milieus, as Russell Young does; had a personal relationship with Warhol, as Peter Beard did; or, as in the case of David Gamble’s digitally altered photograph of Warhol’s living room, include an apparitional image of the artist himself.

Mr. Lorenzen’s works are particularly interesting in the way they reflect both highly refined Warholian principles in the artist’s choice of subject matter as well as in the manner they mirror the societal changes in the new Germany. Pictorially transcending the past emphasis between the two Germanys in their historical battles of biased ideologies, the paintings represent the victory of unbridled consumerism over political dogma, celebrating, in their own way, the victory of the glitz of capitalism over the more dour overtones of proletarian Marxism.

Interestingly, and presumably not without intent, Mr. Lorenzen’s representations also physically re-create the manic intensity of the western side of the actual Berlin Wall itself in the energetic overlapping of imagery and sheer pictorial exuberance.

This is particularly effective for those who may have seen both sides of the barrier when it stood, with the seemingly endless stretch of images and calligraphy on one side standing in stark contrast with the pristine and antiseptic emptiness of the Communist side of the wall. As a result, the barrier itself served as a metaphor for the emptiness of the East’s state-sponsored sense of aesthetics and fed an energetically creative and atmospheric intensity in West Berlin, the wall demarcating a neon Sodom and Gomorrah plopped into the middle of a Teutonic Salt Lake City.

Nowadays, even as the forces of materialism and consumerism have replaced Marxism-Leninism and the images may have changed, delineating the divisions between East and West, differences still remain and it is these that Mr. Lorenzen concentrates on.

At the same time, these differences could easily appear somewhat esoteric to most non-Germans. For example, the interpretation of the traditional Teutonic fairy tale figure of Little Red Riding Hood is apparently associated by one Germany with a type of cheese while the other is reminded of a sparkling wine.

What they really represent, beyond their actual meaning, is the victory of what Warhol would have truly appreciated in the subjugation of ideology to an empty and meaningless contrast of advertising imagery; contemporary culture as a vacuum into which pop imagery becomes symptomatic of and interchangeable with society’s aesthetic priorities and principles.

One doesn’t have to go quite so deep to determine the parallels and impact of Warhol in appraising Russell Young’s large-scale photographs of celebrities and cultural icons. Emphasizing Warhol’s work from 1962-1964 when his focus shifted to the joy and calamity of celebrity and offered a mirror of the evolving cultural worship of mass media, Mr. Young’s photos also immediately echo his use of multiple repetitive images as well as picking source material from popular media and magazines.

For Peter Beard, on the other hand, the impact from Warhol is felt more in the ambiance of the works rather than in any immediate stylistic derivations. Taken from his series titled “Scrapbook From Africa,” the pieces are, by turns, entertainingly whimsical and darkly serious, their embellished surfaces reflecting the writer Elena Lanzanova’s observation that Mr. Beard mixes “naïve designs that recall a certain tribal taste with colored ink.”

David Gamble’s large scale photograph is interesting on a couple of levels, the first being the actual setting (the living room of Warhol’s New York townhouse), and the second being the fact that the figure of a seated Warhol is a Photoshop addition, its presence serving more as Warhol’s ghost than as the real thing.

This creates something of a

double entendre

as one could argue that, even alive and in the flesh, Warhol was nothing if not a cipher, an apparitional non-entity happily and intentionally taking on the character traits appropriate to whatever situation he found himself in. As a result, one could argue that since Warhol strove to barely exist to begin with, a contrived and conjured portrayal is, in many respects, as legitimate a representation as an actual photograph of the man himself.

Also featured in the exhibition at the Kezler Gallery in Southampton, which continues through January 19, are photographs by Wolfgang Ludes and Michael Dweck.