Lenz Geerk
Lenz Geerk is the contemporary artist of melancholia. Renowned for his moody and wistful images of solitary figures or of pairs ruminating on objects or engaged in solitary activities, the Düsseldorf-based German artist applies the principles of expressionism to convey a modern-day understanding of alienation. A group of new paintings currently on display at MASSIMODECARLO in London introduces empty, enigmatic storefronts to his repertoire of still lifes, dreamscapes, and anonymous artist portraits. They follow a suite of monochrome paintings recently unveiled at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles that found the artist rendering his view of the uncanny in a haunting, minimalist language. Across the work is a reverence for inexplicable mystery and an invitation for viewers to find solace in the unsettled and unsettling.
Will Fenstermaker: Much of your work is subtle and reduced in composition: one or two figures isolated in space or bare rooms alongside an object or two that take on an enchanted aura. What do the recurring motifs—croissants, portrait busts, burning mansions, musical instruments—signify in your paintings? How do they function symbolically and narratively?
Lenz Geerk: There’s no specific meaning, as there would be in medieval paintings or Dutch still lifes, but I do try to put objects and colors together that are ambiguous or unsettling. One of the biggest challenges of my generation, in the society that I live in, is how to deal with ambiguity without resorting to judgment. I struggle a lot with anxiety, and I’ve had to learn how to deal with uncertainty—to accept that opposites can coexist. I would be happy if my art allowed people to experience a bit of that mystery.
WF: How we deal with ambiguity can be quite existential. F. Scott Fitzgerald said the mark of a brilliant mind is to hold two conflicting ideas in tension and still be able to function. He’s talking about genius, which is problematic, but I do think he’s right that the defining challenge of the modern age is to figure out how to inhabit opposing realities without breaking down or erupting into magnificent violence.
LG: I agree. Except you don’t need to have a brilliant mind, just a brave and open one. I’m not very good at that. I experience intrusive thoughts and find myself ruminating and trying to resolve them; sometimes it feels really hard to let go. When I come across a work of art that surprises me or that I don’t understand, that helps me resolve this tension. If I look at a Jackson Pollock, for example, I can see how it’s made. He put it on the ground, he threw the paint here and there, and now it’s full. If I look at something by Henri Matisse, I have literally no idea how it’s made. Why did he choose this color, and how did he make it work? Mark Rothko is much the same for me; he’s braver than Pollock. His color-field works help me to try not to decrypt things and just see them as they are.
Lenz Geerk, Holiday Ceramic Course, 2024, acrylic on paper, 20.5 x 12.75 inches. Photo by Paul Salveson. Courtesy of the artist and Robert Projects, Los Angeles.
WF: It’s interesting you mention modern abstraction because your work is often described as using the figurative language of modernism. There’s an attentiveness to your thick application of material and to your detailed light and shadow. I’m reminded of what Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about Paul Cézanne: “Painting is something that takes place among the colors, and how one has to leave them completely alone, so that they can come to terms among themselves.” Would you say you’re facilitating or interfering with that process?
LG: Every step of my work is happening on the canvas. I don’t do sketches or preparations. I may start with a face, and if I really like the eye, then I paint over the rest and jump around from detail to detail until it’s finished. In some paintings, that evolves into narrative. With Holiday Ceramic Course (2024), for example, I wanted to make a feminist statement challenging the idea throughout art history that women are a muse or a vessel for the male artist to display his genius. In it, the two men are nude, and there’s something phallic, even masturbatory, about how they’re playing with their potters’ wheels. The teacher is a woman and an authority figure, and the third potter is a woman who’s fully engrossed in her work. But there’s still something distressing and unresolved about the scene.
Lenz Geerk, Breath, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 39.5 × 27.5 inches. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.
WF: I’d call it disquiet, which you probably think of as a symptom of alienation. Other than the men nearly touching legs, they all seem to inhabit their own private worlds. The relationship between people and objects feels key. I actually think what connects you to someone like Vilhelm Hammershøi or Matisse is an interest in the animism of objects. In The Red Studio, Matisse wasn’t saying, This is what a vase represents; rather, he was invoking it as a totem with hidden depth and special significance to the artist’s search for meaning in their atelier. Something similar happens in your paintings, where these object studies seem to evoke something imagined and unsaid.
LG: You used the word enchanted, which, as I’m not a native English speaker, makes me think of a magical lamp. But the objects do generally represent some internal or sensory experience. The croissant is warm and flaky, but some people may have a gluten allergy or just not like the French. (laughter) The guitar is something you contemplate. The burning house is something you fear. It’s a bit like music. If you listen to a love song when you’re happy, it’s a totally different experience than when you’re heartbroken. You bring something to the work, and it gives something back.
WF: I see. It’s a form of expressionism. I had this theory that the mansions represent the end of ornamentation and a rupture with history.
LG: (laughter) Because they’re Victorian? I can see that. They’re painted after dollhouses, speaking to your point about objecthood. I was actually inspired by John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and the Andrew Wyeth painting Christina’s World. I have this thought that in her dreams Christina sees the farmhouse burning. Fire is natural but can be started by humans, so it’s again about negotiating internal and external states.
WF: That interplay is also present in your paintings of storefronts, which are somewhat Edward Hopper-esque scenes of empty shops depicted from outside.
LG: Yes, the storefronts are a new subject, which I was drawn to as spaces that are attuned to fashion currents and world events. I wish galleries would be more engaged in that way. Art—especially the Western, avant-garde art of our generation—has mostly turned its eye toward the future; but between the rising right wing and climate change, it can be hard to believe in the future, which leads to art feeling disconnected or irrelevant. Ultimately, I’m someone who wants to have children. I want to focus on what we can do to sustain beauty through a dark age.
“The dancers, and sculptors, and musicians in my paintings are a nod to this idea that there’s always happiness and hope but also solitude and apprehension.”
— Lenz Geerk
WF: You know, I was also recently diagnosed with anxiety. As I was telling my doctor about this generalized sense of dread that I have, this feeling that at any moment some fresh terror could break loose, through his window I saw a pillar of smoke reaching across the marina. This was the morning that the Palisades Fire ignited. A few months later, the National Guard was deployed. People were protesting, and people are being disappeared, yet you have to find a way to carry on.
LG: I was supposed to arrive in Los Angeles on the day of Trump’s inauguration but did not fly because of the fires. Los Angeles is a vibrant city, but we’re not living in bright times. I had the city somewhat in mind while making my grayscale paintings in particular. As anxious people, we tend to see things in black and white, but these works are rich with shades of gray. I find it extraordinary that, nonetheless, people carry on. The dancers, and sculptors, and musicians in my paintings are a nod to this idea that there’s always happiness and hope but also solitude and apprehension. I want them to be consoling. Even in dark times, there’s beauty and tenderness, moments worth preserving and remembering. To me, this duality is very profound in art.
WF: I’ve been thinking about melancholia lately, which in the medieval imagination was a state of disengagement and of being attuned toward a secret meaning hidden behind the mundane. Melancholia was associated with both painting and hallucination, and only later became what we’d call sadness or depression. Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I depicts the moment of inspiration in an ambiguous scene suggesting both creativity and madness. You said that art now looks to the future. But in some painters—you, Michaël Borremans, Luc Tuymans—I can see this older idea of introspection. Your paintings also share a stage-like sensibility with Borremans’s work; one could say you both paint theaters of the mind. In Dürer’s conception, this is a fruitful but dangerous place because dissociation can lead to insanity. I’m curious what you think about this theory of imagination.
LG: I have one problem with that Dürer work, which is that he portrays melancholy as a woman. In his self-portraits he depicts himself as a strong, broad-shouldered genius, and it would have been much more honest if in Melencolia he showed his own vulnerability and struggles—his anxiety over his art—instead of allegorizing it and attributing it to something female.
Dürer is an interesting one in Germany because he was our great Renaissance artist, but then he was also loved by the Nazis. For a long time it was very unfashionable to like him. Of course, both things are true: Hitler liked Dürer, and Dürer made some magnificent art. In Dürer’s time, belief in the impending apocalypse was prevalent throughout Europe. It’s not hard to imagine what it must have been like to feel that catastrophe is imminent. But at the same time, it’s also something that sets off a lot of energy. What do you do when the world ends? You bake, you dance, you sing, you make art. I admire the enigma of Melencolia. Her face is dark with frustration, but also someone practicing mindfulness could be posed the same way. It’s not necessarily the case that her state of disengagement leads to madness. It can also mean peace.