Andy Denzler (born 3 August 1965) is a Swiss artist. His distinctive technique of distorting the freshly applied surface of his paintings has shaped his entire oeuvre in painting, printmaking, sculpture and drawing.
Denzler was born in Zurich. He trained at the Kunstgewerbeschule and the F+F Schule für Gestaltung in Zurich, both schools of applied arts, as well as at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. In 2006 he graduated as Master of Fine Arts from London's Chelsea College of Art and Design. Denzler lives and works in Zurich.
Denzler's works are shown in solo and group exhibitions in international galleries and museums,[1] [2] in Europe, America, Asia and, since 2010, also in Russia. His works can be found at the Denver Art Museum, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montreal, Canada, the David Roberts Art Foundation, London, the Tel Aviv Museum of Modern Art in Israel, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the White House in Washington DC, at the Museum Würth at Schwäbisch Hall in Germany, at the Burger Collection Hong Kong, the White Cube Collection, London, the KunstWerk – Sammlung Klein in Eberdingen/Stuttgart and at the Kunsthalle Rostock, Germany."I bring time and motion into the imagery, by using both time and motion. It’s an alla prima technique, painting wet-on-wet; I control the speed of the painting process, because there is a limited amount of time before the canvas dries".[3] Through the streaks of the blurred image surface, Denzler's paintings appear as if the time on them has momentarily stopped. Denzler's works move between abstraction and reality. With the classic means of oil painting, the artist endeavors to fathom the borderlines between fiction and reality. Through his mostly horizontal use of a squeegee for blurring the oil paint, which he previously applies to the canvas in heavy impasto and thick layers, he achieves the impression of the object's motion blur or the notion of a distorted, faltering video recording. Time freezes. The paintings are snap-shots of events that take place, blurred, distorted movements, Freeze Frames that stylistically move between Photorealism and Abstract Expressionism. In his paintings Denzler frequently alludes to our life in a disruptive age of lens based images.
In a world seemingly enamoured with high definition and extreme resolution, the distorted photo-like quality of Denzler's paintings provides an alternative to our often over-glossed 'reality‘. Intent on pushing the boundaries between abstraction and photorealism, the artist captures the authenticity of the everyday, creating an honest and often intimate moment on canvas. (Reality Glitch, Schön! Magazine, November 2019[4])
But unlike many contemporary painters, Denzler doesn't reproduce the photographic image onto a canvas to create a template for his work. Instead, he paints freehand, using the photograph as a reference, and building up layer upon layer of wet paint. Then, when he has a 'perfect painting', he deconstructs it, leaving in its wake traces of what was. The vestigial image, boldly striped with horizontal scrapes made by a spatula dragged across the canvas, has the effect of a video that has been permanently put on pause, giving the viewer a sense that something came before, and something will come after. But what remains in the present is a single transient, but captive, moment. (Creative Boom, 14 June 2017 by Katy Kowan[5])
Denzler's new paintings unite the precision and nostalgia of realism with the bold dynamism and pulsating energy of gestural abstraction. Creating mysterious, eerie and sometimes uncomfortable moments, the artist invites the viewer into his private, voyeuristic world. Known for his signature style of thick horizontal bands of pigment traversing the canvas in thick choppy abstract strips – staccato points that add visual energy and suggest details lost in the fog of memory, time and space. (Wall Street International Magazine/Arts, 24 January 2014[6])
Denzler analyses the medium, the ideational and representational possibilities inherent in present-day painting with dedication and enthusiasm. He has thereby secured himself an important and individual position on the international art scene. (Tages-Anzeiger, 24 August 2008, translated from German)
Biennials
2016
Solo exhibitions
2023
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
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2012
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2010
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2002