Lenz Geerk’s figurative paintings evoke cinema in their reliance on ambience, their depictions of movement and stillness, and their ability to connect with audiences. Geerk generates mood and emotion with compositions and hues that feel inspired by memory. The artist’s muted palettes capture ineffable, everyday moments that are fraught with ambiguity and angst. 

Lenz Geerk’s third solo show with the gallery is a deeply psychological exploration of the complexity of desire. Simmering tension permeates every work. Illicit relationships unfold on borrowed time against the sun- drenched light of summer. Geerk explores the shifts from attachment to separation, between closeness and distance, and fuses perception with touch, by suggesting an edge that is loath to reveal itself completely. 

Geerk’s evocative canvases are defined by a selective use of color and psychologically charged themes. His current show features his Beach Couples series, along with works that explore desire and attachment against a backdrop of moody coastal ambiance.

Showcasing paintings that possess an unsettling simplicity, Lenz Geerk’s Arrival show at Roberts Project in Los Angeles explores desire. His desire. In one work, three bathers float on, dive into and stand at the edge of a lake. The water is depicted as an inky black rectangle in the bottom half of the canvas. A thick grey-green sky hangs above. Apart from a few faint hints of skin in the water, the landscape is shown entirely in consistent blocks of colour. In place of a busy scene, all that is left is the action of the bathers and the heady closeness of their bodies.

The matter of indifference in an overtly alienated world has become a widely discussed topic. During times of crisis, many people just switch off from reality and suppress their emotions to deal easier with despicable circumstances. 

The works of Swiss artist Lenz Geerk convey an array of emotional states coming out of fragile moments in time and space. Through his figurative works embedded in European painterly tradition on the scale from Old masters to Giorgio de Chirico and the Surrealist, he meticulously captures either deep melancholy or contemplation.

By Andrew Berardini

“The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others,” wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892, in the story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In the largest woeful painting in Lenz Geerk’s exhibition, Untitled, 2019, the walls’ hues may be just as lurid and maddening, ranging from sinister buttercup to jaundiced saffron, filling the room with a soft, staid menace. Edging away from the right edge of the canvas, a woman stands with one arm grasping the other in the universal posture of the restrainedly disturbed. Her trim black hair, almost shaved on one side and bobbed on the other, frames a face deeply blank, with dark eyes under thin elegant eyebrows and an angled nose pointing down toward colorless lips marked only by the shadow of their parting. She seems to guard an abyss of melancholy, trauma, and perhaps ennui.

By Annabel Osberg

In tandem shows at Roberts Projects, two figurative painters’ allusions to contemporary anomie are animated by skeptical drollness. Celeste Rapone‘s bloated female protagonists contort and distend as though awkwardly striving to fill the expansive canvases they occupy. In the smaller gallery, Lenz Geerk‘s five paintings exude a bleak mood that belies subtle comedy. 

By Eve Wood

It’s very difficult to create a cohesive and engaging narrative with a suite of only five paintings. It’s inevitable that some works appear more central to the narrative structure than others, and in many cases the viewer is left out of the narrative loop altogether. So, it is particularly satisfying to discover work by an artist that holds up so beautifully in terms of creating an engaging and comprehensive story in only five works. In almost all of Lenz Geerk’s paintings there is either a door or a door frame, which suggests the convergence of the past with the present as we step through an open door into the future or remain behind the door in what metaphorically could suggest the past.

By Rosanna Albertini

The sky is flat and gray over the rain. As gray as the pages of a book Geerk painted with no words inside; only a small branch with leaves  appears, it might be an alien presence. There must be something personal I share with Geerk’s paintings. And it is not only a sense of familiarity with a painted world explored by Italian modern artists from the beginning to the middle of the 20th century, such as  Massimo Campigli, Mario Sironi, Filippo De Pisis, Giorgio De Chirico, Carlo Carrà and others – even Amedeo Modigliani. Their sceneries were often called ‘metaphysical.’ Big word in these days, I let it go. Perhaps these Italian artists only preserved an ossified gallery of figures and buildings to replace a landscape of ruins dominated by wars and misery — humans and cities under the same spell —  with imaginary monuments of their minds. Artists avoided resemblances to reality, bringing to life new under-cover mythologies wearing beauty and distance.

By Eve Wood

The paintings of Lenz Geerk are unprepossessing and quietly sublime, his figures poised inside singular moments of divine inscrutability as they consider the world around them, whether it be a dying flower or the pointed edge of a table. This sense of veiled mystery could be said to denote a distinctly German sensibility as there are obvious connections with artists like Ludwig Kirchner and Rudolf Schlichter, yet it is Geerk’s celebration of the mundane—the passing moment, an ominous glance that lingers in place of a smile—that makes his work so memorable. There is a sense of timelessness at work here, as though each figure were cradled inside an ever-expanding universe of nothingness—a strange and incontrovertible paradise wherein a kitchen table becomes a makeshift stage onto which Geerk’s human narratives play out.

By Aaron Horst 

The paintings in Lenz Geerk’s exhibition The Table Portraits at Roberts Projects often picture figures who have suddenly, seemingly, fallen asleep, perhaps from lack of oxygen. The bouffant-ed heroine of Table Portrait III (all works 2018) doubles over from a standing position, her back knotty and arched. A similar narcolepsy afflicts Geerk’s figures in The Moth, as well as in an untitled work featuring a languid woman curled up by a single-stem vase. The rather thick substrate of wool on which Geerk paints adds to the at first soporific, blanketing effect.