Andy Denzler: Renaissance Paintings Reloaded: Galerie Peter Kilchmann

Rämistrasse 33, Zurich

Renaissance Paintings Reloaded builds upon the artist's first solo exhibition at the gallery in 2023 which he introduced, among other works, his new Spectral Painting series. The Spectral Paintings mark a significant development within Andy Denzler's artistic practice. Whereas his earlier paintings were primarily based on staged photographs and urban scenes, this body of work expands both his visual sources and his painterly approach. The term ‘’Spectral Painting’ is deliberately ambiguous. Rather than referring to the scientific meaning of spectral as relating to the spectrum, Denzler employs the term in its English sense of ‘ghostly’, ‘phantom-like’, or ‘ethereal’. In doing so, he evokes images that hover between presence and absence, memory and disappearance. While these works were based on vintage photographs and film stills, the latest generation draws on compositions by renowned Renaissance masters, especially Titian and Tintoretto. It is precisely their treatment of movement, light, and drama that provides Denzler with a rich foundation for reinterpretation. Rather than approaching historical masterpieces as static relics of the past, he understands them as part of a living visual archive that can be continually reinterpreted and generate new meanings in the present. Employing his signature technique of horizontal blurring through thick impasto layers and fluid brushstrokes, Denzler distorts these images, rendering them fragmented and estranged. At the same time, his expressive brushwork and vibrant, highly saturated palette evoke the gestural intensity of American Neo-Expressionism and the European Neue Wilde movement. Through the latter technique, Denzler has expanded his oeuvre that was previously characterized by restrained, earthy and muted tones into a new painterly phase, a direction he continues to pursue in his most recent body of work.