Ruth Kretzmenn, Insurgency: Opposing the Plasic Law 29.June – 30. Juli 2011, GALERiARTiST,Fasanenstr. 68, 10719 Berlin, by craniv boyd.

Ruth Kretzmann, Insurgency: Opposing the Plastic Law 29.June – 30. Juli 2011, GALERiARTiST,Fasanenstr. 68, 10719 Berlin, by craniv boyd.

 

If as an current art spectator you are in need of a groovy grand tour of the 19th century, romantic and realist french painting, then Ruth Kretzmann, and her recently hanging one person painting exhibition in central, Berlin West, could have fixed your yen. Ten mid scaled fraught, oils on canvass, with colliding subject matter, amounting to, wry visual punning that imbues the general impression of: gifted young north east sea coast American___Kretzmenn, comes from Massachusetts yet part of her artistic training transpired in Bavaria___ overdosing on the cultural painted assets of the good old world.

 

That aside we have poetical titling of the artworks with mild sardonicisms like both Philosophizing Sheep, of 2010, and Welcome to my Mansion, of the same year that ask of the viewer to know their G. Courbet form their E. Manet. The images, crafted by Kretzmann are, bastardized mutants of known and celebrated masterpieces of the second half of the 19th century, cloaked in all-to-terrible and gaudy garb.

 

The nude woman figure in Philosophizing Sheep, which corresponds to the seated staring woman in the now celebrated, and mythical, Manet, placed in the rail terminal turned Museum, Musée d'Orsay, in Paris, smokes a cigarette as she confronts those who behold her. Sheep trample waters in a landscape that would be bucolic were it not for the looks of too much acid rains. Or more literally, day-glo fluorescent blue contour edges delineating both, the wood, and their leaves. A man with a larger than life animal head accompanies her and is seated on a patch of glowing blue grass.

 

Trite processional lines of minivans,summer-vacation-trailers, clutter, and at times obscure, the leg room of the standing figures in Welcome to my Mansion. Supplementary figures who such as: female blond toddler in diapers, and kneeling, pale, grand-mother type wearing pink cardigan, co-populate the painting plain with Courbet him-self who has the head of a black horse, the art patron, Bruyas the art collector, appearing in Kretzmann's version, both dejected and with a case of hydrocephalus, and the character cast in the role of man servant, in Welcome to my Mansion, is naked below the waist, his, unseen fully frontal nudity, reminiscent of the metaphysical Italian G. de Ciricho large masturbatetor.

 

In that the paintings are as much about today as they are other older paintings painted at a minimum age of 100 years, the mid scaled oils, of Ruth Kretzmenn, although eclectic, dis-topic in their soucre imagery, and directed in their acerbic titles, are a far cry from being mutinous. As an art exhibition in Berlin west, just a hop, skip or jump from Ku'damm, Insurgency: Opposing the Plastic Law, proffers neither insurrection nor opposition. The paintings, however attest to, artwork of a good colorist. In particular, River Crossing Cattle, of 2011, a painting with two figures in a Phoenician ship fording a river, makes plain with token means,the mysterious sojourn, that can be art creation. By craniv boyd.