ANDY DENZLER: THE GOYA PROJECT

KÖNIG BERGSON is pleased to present “THE GOYA PROJECT”, a new solo exhibition by Swiss artist Andy Denzler.

September 14 – October 20, 2024

The individual works in “THE GOYA PROJECT” are striking for the degree to which they blur, abstract, and obfuscate the visual language of the original works after which they are taken. In particular, the almost total lack of color is immediately apparent, turning what might have been nuanced areas into pure value contrasts of black and white, introducing a significant element of visual noise into the pictorial equation, and allusion to the binarism of the digital age in which these newer works were produced.

The remove captured in “THE GOYA PROJECT” is both temporal and media-historical, problematizing not just the inaccessibility of the context out of which the earlier works were born, but the lens through which such paintings can be seen today.

The most recent of these paintings are muted, colored reappraisals of Goya’s iconic “MAYA”, of which both a nude and clothed version were executed around 1800. The presentation of both versions underscores the degree of unmasking, like the removal of Maya’s garments, that courses through all the works in the show, in which a smooth representational surface is undermined everywhere by descriptive insufficiencies.

The heralding of a digital age is not unlike the one in which Goya found himself, and Denzler’s historical citations are similarly imbued with the tremendous upheavals in the social and political spheres of everyday life.

In the relatively brief period in which the current works were created, the filtering screens of a mediatized world have only grown in scale and dimension, and Denzler is one of a few artists who put our very habits of seeing and witnessing into a state of radical indeterminacy, offering the painted picture as its own filter, replete with saturation and noise, which reflects rather than remedies the present.