All About Identity
Laurentz Thurn’s Thick, Electric Paintings Look Inside New Yorkers
“I don’t think you can ever know the inside of a person,” said artist Laurentz Thurn, speaking from the Hamburg area of Germany where his children are attending camp. “You know, the inner self.”
“But, I think you can tell a lot from the surface things, the clothes, the movement, how people fit into space and move in it, who they are and how they present themselves,” he added. “That you can tell if you’re observant. And that’s what I’ve tried to do.”
Thurn, who’s lived in New York for the past 16 years, shows off his vivid and mysteriously dead-on observations in “New York Moves: Paintings by Laurentz Thurn,” a jazzy, pounding exhibition of portraits of the people he’s encountered in his environment around Harlem, the Bronx and Manhattan. It’s another in a series of quirky, one-of-a-kind exhibitions at the downtown Goethe-Institut.
The first thing you’ll notice in the display is that it’s difficult to describe Thurn’s works as paintings in the usual sense because the way they’re executed has nothing to do with what we think of as brushwork. The people in his portraits never
show their eyes, but you can feel them, you can watch them coming and going even if the painting itself hangs on the wall. That’s true of his earlier, big works as well as his newer, smaller works on paper, called “A Question of Identity.”
“No, no, see, you can see their faces, and you can tell a lot about them from the way they’re standing, or their poses, or how they seem in the space they occupy in relation to each other,” Thurn said. “And it’s all about identity, about where you’re from and where you are and how that fits in space and place.”
This is a human, even poetic observation, and it’s especially the observation of an immigrant, the outsider planting himself in a new space. It was that way for Thurn when he moved to New York after the fall of the Berlin wall when a space opened up at a reasonable price in New York.
“It was like a fairytale,” he said. “But I had some ideas about America and New York. There were a few Germans and Eastern Europeans where I moved, but essentially I was one of the few white people living there. So that was something, and I thought, this was what my idea of America had been. And to me, these works, these portraits, are American to the core—these are Americans. I grew up in Germany with America being ‘Kojak’ or ‘Shaft,’ and shows like that, the urban landscape. What I found was neighborhoods and diversity and all kinds of people—and that was something I was used to in terms of modern Berlin.”
And he clearly understood his urban environment. Viewers tend to go up close to examine the unique composition of Thurn’s works. They’re so thick with paint that you’d think Thurn owned a paint factory. “I rarely if ever used a brush,” he said. “I used knives, spoons, scrapers, a stick I found in the streets with nails on it,” he added. “You create space and lines with tools.”
This is part of what makes the works so electric. For instance, Thurn paints a young African American man, vertically ambling through his neighborhood in a thick Yankees jacket. Up close, you can see how some things, including the background, are thinner than others. The wrinkles of the jacket are built up as if they are almost alive. Or in a different painting, you can clearly make out the colors and outline of a Coke machine, glowing in the humid night, along with a man and a dog, his tail thick with black paint. These works have been ladled, poked, stirred, thickened, smoothed, built, erected and slopped almost like jam and jelly on a sandwich.
“Yeah, I get that sometimes—it looks almost sloppy and accidental,” Thurn said. “That’s when I know I’ve done what I wanted to do. When some guy comes up to you and says, ‘Hmm … I can do that. It looks easy.’ I work fast, but it’s not easy.”
It is, however, observant, emotional and full of sound. Even though this is thick, action-filled painting in an impressionistic style, not a soul here is alike. “They’re all unique,” Thurn said. “You can tell.”
The artist is now working on a project that recreates scenes from Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing.” “We’ve talked on the phone,” Thurn noted. “We’ll see.”
“New York Moves: Paintings by Laurentz Thurn” runs through Sept. 2 at the Goethe-Institut, 812 7th St., NW. For more information, please call (202) 289-1200 or visit www.goethe.de/washington.
Gary Tischler is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.
