Initially, I wasn’t very impressed by Lukas Duwenhögger’s paintings. Then I was.
The works of this German artist, who has lived in Istanbul since 2000, have a distinctive Ottoman sensibility, both sunlit and sinister: a superficial queer theatre of languorous fabulousness, shot through anxiety. The settings are fluid, moving from an operatic nineteenth century into a gilded 1930s and on. It always seems to be the afternoon, waiting to see what the evening will bring. Individually, the works suggest dreams; collectively, they hint at an unspoken history of persecution and betrayal.
There is a special delight in seeing Duwenhögger in the Georgian, domestic elegance of Raven Row. As you climb its four floors, as the scale of the galleries contracts, the paintings take on a more vivid intimacy. An installation on the top floor, ‘Probleema’, hangs five small works in a wooden shed: four men around a table in the midst of some kind of argument look across at four individual paintings of men in the street seen from behind. As in a lot of Duwenhögger’s works, the tensions – sexual, political, cultural, temporal – are strung across the room like wires. One of the most overt works is the model ‘The Celestial Teapot’, a ludicrous ‘proposal for a memorial site for the persecuted homosexuals of National Socialism in Berlin’. At the top of a tower, and surmounted by a conch shell, the titular vessel has human arms: one hand on hip, one limply waving. However you are memorialised, Duwenhögger reminds us (you might become a park, you might become a teapot), elegance and frivolity are absurd and can come at a terrible price.
