Philipp Gufler
AN INVITATION TO INDULGE

Opening, Friday, November 29 from 5 to 9 p.m.

On view till January, 25, 2025.

Philipp Gufler (born in Germany in 1989) delves into the history of Germany, The Netherlands and beyond, using his research to create works composed of pigment-spattered mirrors. Rectangular, triangular, square, these forms are reminiscent of the recognizable modernist shapes in the paintings of Frank Stella. Repetitive, geometric divisions into fields of color emanate a sense of calm and dignity. At times, it’s just color, or rather the material the pigment was drawn from, that is queerying our thought process, twisting the realm of pure abstraction into a narrative inspired by real-life events.

Is it not a carnation, whose pink essence covers the surface of such a mirror, a Wildesque symbol of cruising around the city in search of a partner? Can we talk about the suffering of the LGBTQ+ community without including pink triangles, which were the shapes the Nazis made gay people sew into their clothing at concentration camps during the Third Reich? These motifs set Gufler’s mirrored works into the queer context in a fascinating way, opening doors to the increasingly crowded room marked “Queer Art.” In Poland, it’s a novel moment. In this context, it’s worth mentioning the conceptual project by Karol Radziszewski Invisible (History of Belarussian Queerness) which comprises a series of purposely overexposed images, arranged as black squares on a white background. These images portray events from the lives of gay Belarussians in Communist Minsk. There’s also his “Flag” series, which references the Olympic symbol. Gufler goes one step further, launching a game onto the field of modernist art, whereby the mirror image is a symbol of relativity. This convention has been expertly applied in the past by the likes of Andy Warhol and Michelangelo Pistoletto in the west, and Edward Krasiński in Poland.

Gufler’s mirrored reflections are suffused with pigment, so they no longer depict their subject in a direct way. Instead, the vibrant mix of colors, cut up with slashes of more color, mar their reflections, just like gossip and lies mar the facts of life. The world in these mirrors is radically different from the one we know.

An Invitation to Indulge stands as an appendix of sorts to Gossipmongers (a group show bringing together Philipp Gufler, Karol Radziszewski and Jaanus Samma). A piece of gossip may often be the only bit of information we are afforded about an event, which doesn’t quite fit into the main narrative, primarily because it refers to an excluded group: for instance, women, immigrants, queer people. The archaeology of collective LGBTQ+ memory is based on detailed accounts tucked away in private archives. These documents are often coded, to disguise them from the prying eyes of society, who have the power to ostracize and censure, blurring out everything that is outside of the bounds of the heterosexual norm. And yet, don’t the histories written by heterosexual men through the ages also bend the truth, twist the facts to create a binary, black-and-white image of the world, with no room for shades of gray? Perhaps the queer-infused vision of the world conjured by Philipp Gufler isn’t so unrealistic as some might think. Perhaps a closer look would in fact bring us closer to the truth?