Karl Kueffel

Karl Kueffel, Night Dream, 2012, Mixed Media on Canvas, 54 x 42 In.

Aldo Castillo by Karl Kueffel, Germany, 2019

Karl Kueffel Tribute to the Legacy of Joan Miro The discerning eye of prolific German artist Karl Kueffel is unmistakable in a series of paintings he entitled "Tribute to the Legacy of Joan Miro”. The watercolors, mixed media and lithographs, completed between 1996 and 1997 are an unabashed homage to the spectacular achievement of the modernist Spanish master Joan Miro. Unlike many late twentieth-century artists who appropriate other artists works, Kueffel extends and amplifies the power of Miro's imagery through a recontextualization that reveals Miro's genius in a new light. Scores of Kueffel's contemporaries merely copy familiar works of art in a vain attempt at creating a verisimilitude of the original. Kueffel, on the other hand, distances himself just far enough from his source to capture the spirit rather than the precise appearance of his source. Kueffel celebrates Miro's spirit by presenting a world reverberating with subconscious exploration and energy, far removed from external reality. Each linear component declares the spontaneous joys and sorrows of Kueffel's coiling, contorted forms. His personages are universal metaphors for any being--human or animal--or even monstrous hybrids. As with Miro, these creatures inhabit a fantastic phantasmagoric parallel universe. Both artists share a remarkable visual wit of figures with over-the-top bizarre organic contours. However, Kueffel is generally less pessimistic than Miro, pushing his creatures' amusingly surreal identity to a higher pitch. His aggressively comical, childlike approach is expressed by a continuously curving line of great fragility against light and delicate tonal values. Kueffel successfully took the the work of Miro as a point of departure and mined this rich vein of modernism with his own creative imagination. In his compositions, Kueffel fills the central pictorial space with his strange and humorous images, yet he eschews Miro's tendency to create vast abstract negative space, with the figures often isolated on the margin. Miro's more expansive format, reminiscent of a barren moonscape, is often sparsely inhabited by isolated creatures, in contrast to Kueffel's tight party-central atmosphere in which forms are scattered more evenly across the picture space. Kueffel's greater creature density corresponds to the increasing global urbanization of life in the late twentieth century. With this subtle altering of the spacial composition, Kueffel extends the impact of Miro's to the context of life as we have come to know it. Kueffer's flamboyant recreations of an esteemed modern old master are more than a reverential tribute, but stand on their own as singular, distinctive statements which both append and augment their legendary source. Robert P. Metzger, PhD.

Karl Kueffel

Karl Kueffel artistic vision includes that as a child he studied under the leadership of Prof. Heinz Lembke-Rousseau and Jürgen Blum. Both, Lembke-Rousseau and Blum were private art teachers at the Rittershain Castle, near King Forest (Koenigswald), Germany. This experience gave Kueffel great to his future work. From 1971-1979 the artist studied with Prof. Jürgen Blum at the Monastery Cornberg Station, where Kueffel developed his first approach to abstract painting. After this basic artistic training, the artist developed a distinct style of painting and quickly established itself as an artistic newcomer. In his new paintings, Karl Kueffel combines traditional artistic aesthetics with contemporary elements through high-quality technology. In 1991, Karl Küffel held his first major exhibition at Gallery Bauknecht, Munich. Since then, Kueffel has exhibited his work at the Gallery Differente, Hamburg, Gallery Perling, Krefeld, Morsum Huese Cultural Center, Sylt and at Gallery Siejes Saeule, Berlin. In 2000, Kueffel presented “Labyrinth of Passion" at the main Church, Thueringen. In 2001, Kueffel held a solo exhibition entitled “Old Berlin-New Berlin" at the Victory Column in Berlin. This exhibition was in collaboration with Dr. Dieter Vorsteher, Deputy Director of the German Historical Museum (the Deutsches Historisches Museum), Berlin. In 2003 he was represented at the art fair Kunstmesse, in Salzburg, Austria. Another solo exhibition “Film and Society 100 years” took place in 2004 at the Zeughaus, at the German Historical Museum, Berlin. He also exhibited in 2005 at the Film Museum, Muenchen. Currently the artist splits his time between Tenerife Island, Spain and Berlin, Germany. His paintings are in private and public collections, including the permanent collection of the German Historical Museum in Berlin, at the Welmar Europas Kulturhauptstadt, Thueringen and in the New York Goethe Institute. He is currently represented by the Aldo Castillo Gallery, U.S.A. Kueffel also been positively reviewed by historian and art critic, Prof. Dr. Hanns Theodor Flemming and published at the Die Welt magazine among others. - Essay written by Robert Metzger. ABOUT ROBERT METZGER Robert Metzger, Director Emeritus of the Reading Public Museum, served in that capacity at the Aldrich Museum, the Allentown Art Museum, and the Stamford Museum and Nature Center and worked as Curator for W. Hawkins Ferry in Grosse Pointe, Michigan and for Lydia Winston Malbin and Richard Brown Baker in New York. He is the author of St. Petersburg Realism (U.S.S.R.), Ronald Reagan: American Icon, Abstract Expressionism Lives!, Edward Hopper: Early Impressions, Franz Kline: the Jazz Murals, and British Romantic Art and monographs on Arakawa, Nakian, Stamos, Boghosian, Tobin, Stubbs, Stuempfig, Murray, Namingha, Meneeley, Press, Coyer, and Strauser.

Karl Kueffel: Automatist Transformations

The beginning of the Surrealist movement in the early 1920’s came to define new psychological dimensions in European Modernist art. It sought to reveal the unconscious and subconscious dynamic of the mind through the discovery of stream-of-consciousness and the invention of psychic automatism. These techniques sought to free the imagination and expose what lay below the surface of everyday rational thought. Automatism in particular became a favored Surrealist method and profoundly influenced the development of American Abstract Expressionism. In spite of the intellectual and conceptual constraints that have been the framework of much contemporary Postmodern art, the history of both psychic and abstract automatism as a door to discovering the subconscious self remains an ongoing field of potential artistic exploration. The German artist Karl Kueffel has worked in the realm of Surrealism and psychic automatism as the central theme of his past and present work. His art reflects inspiration from many of the movement’s major artists, including Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, Jackson Pollock, Yves Tanguy, Wassily Kandinsky, and Marc Chagall. Given Kueffel’s German background it is significant that many of his influences were important Modernist artists of French, Spanish, Russian and American cultural origins, with his current paintings emphasizing the influences of Miro, Dali and Pollock in particular. Kueffel’s art give clues to the story that reveals the artist’s subconscious state of mind and how it emotionally revealed itself over time. Kueffel’s State of Dreams paintings from 2012 uses Salvador Dali’s work as it’s starting point, employing the computer to distort Dali’s landscapes and meticulously re-render them in his own hand. They result in abstractions with fragments of landscape or figuration swirled into a wild, phantasmagorical mix of strangely dimensioned surfaces. In essence Kueffel is “automatizing” Dali into abstract nightmarish labyrinths. Occasionally a small head peeps out of an entrapping vortex, or two small figures are depicted in divided spheres, trying to make contact but failing. The artist made a psychologically interesting series for the Ambient art fair at Frankfurt Am Main in 2000 which delve into the theme of diminutive human figures overwhelmed by powerful forces. There is a sense of childlike invention in these paintings, direct in their color, using perfunctory forms and expressive storytelling. Each painting depicts an ominous plane of black entering the left of the picture, partially covering a small building in the center overlooking a scene that dramatizes human suffering, loss, and tragedy. In one picture a figure stabs the other with a knife, dripping a trail of blood. In another two figures seeking reconciliation are separated by a gulf. Another panel depicts a figure walking on a crucifixion cross, while yet another reunites the figures attempting to cross a bridge. There is a drama between contact and separation; the expression of the human need for companionship but the danger of pain and violence should the risk be attempted. A more Abstract Expressionist version of anxious emotional states is reflected in Kueffel’s 1985 paintings from the Festival of Art at Cornberg Monastery. Fiery red and yellow slashes of paint reveal a dark abyss behind them. A grid of black and red bars almost obscures a small figure that seems trapped by the construction of brush marks and lines. Ghostly faces appear and disappear in and out of automatist lines drawn into wet paint. By contrast Kueffel’s recent psychic automatist paintings, his Fantasy series created in 2011 when he set up a second home and studio in Cape Coral, Florida, signals an important change in the artist’s expressionist mood, instigated by the presence of bright sunlight and warm weather. The Formerly dark and turgid surfaces become brighter in color, with Miro-inspired yellows, blues, and reds. Playful Jackson Pollock-like dripped lines appear more often, describing sinewy gestures and morphing into playful imagery such as biomorphic bits of nature, and comic figures. Out of random drips and lines a spontaneous subconscious imagery comes into play. Like the German abstract Surrealist artist Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schultz) Kueffel heads in a more purely psychic automatist direction. It is significant that Wols left Germany to study in Paris in 1932 where the Surrealist artist Max Ernst befriended him. Wols’ work influenced French abstract expressionist artists like Georges Mathieu, a seminal artist of the movement known as Tachism . Like Wols, Kueffel sought a new and inspiring environment to counter the dark historical weight of his Germanic background. As both an artist and a person he has held a particular interest in creating projects that reflect humanitarian concern for children who have suffered from war, poverty and persecution in different cultures. This internationalist and empathetic state of mind is reflected in his 2006 Children of the World photo/painting project series. Some of Kueffel’s happiest works are part of his 1996 series entitled Tribute to the Legacy of Joan Miro . These pictures also combine the use of gestural drip lines inspired by Pollack and occasionally take their compositional cue from Kandinsky’s Bauhaus abstractions. There is a happy sense of discovery in Kueffel’s biomorphic creatures, cosmic moons and stars, and whimsical faces. The strangeness of the environments in these works is not as hostile or frightening as in some of his other paintings, being tempered by a sense of comic play and serendipity. These pictures will accompany him for a project in Nicaragua where he will be working with underprivileged children, stimulating them to express of their experiences, dreams, and goals through art. These Miro inspired works shows Kueffel’s conscious acknowledgement that life is not one-sided, giving play to the child inside himself by caring about and helping to inspire the potential of children in general. Many of his works give voice to the child’s view of the world and, like his Surrealist predecessors, are inspired by the child’s lack of inhibition and freedom from social constraint and structure. Through the Surrealist tradition of psychic automatism the darkness of his German Thanatos , his homeland’s painful history is countered by the spontaneousness of life-giving possibilities discovered through historical French and American Modernist art traditions. Diane Thodos is and artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She is a 2002 recipiant of a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and exhibits at the Kouros Gallery in New York City, the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago.