›beautiful view‹ 10/02/2023—15/04/2023

• Deniz Alt

Frankfurt 10/02/2023—15/04/2023

Deniz Alt was born in Aschaffenburg in 1978 and attended the renowned Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He was a student of Peter Angermann, Michael Krebber and Christa Näher. Perspective, architecture and lonely figures are always at the centre of his pictures and fill the "beautiful views" that ironically lend the new exhibition its title.

The German-Turkish artist with Armenian roots uses oil paint on his canvases in an interplay of strong, objective strokes and veiled passages. Pastose paint is contrasted with light and glazed moments. This deliberate application of paint gives him stability and anchors his figures and spaces on the canvases, as the artist himself explains.

As a painter of cityscapes, Deniz Alt continues the tradition of Venetian and Flemish artists who specialized in vedute (cityscapes) and the use of rigorous perspective. Alt elaborates on this traditional art, makes it his own and gives it a new language, updating it in a contemporary way.

The exhibition ›schöne aussicht‹ celebrates three outstanding groups of works that show the artist's dynamic style. Dilapidated shipwrecks in bright summer colors, beautiful views of the Frankfurt skyline and its museum world, where art lovers stroll, exhibit or linger in front of works of art.

The subjects of the first group of works are relics of ships and aircraft stranded in the desert, dried-up lakes or desert-like spaces. Such dystopian settings may initially arouse unease or strange feelings in the viewer, but for the artist they are merely starting points for the creation of the image. By using strong, bright colors, Deniz Alt transforms that uncomfortable feeling into something positive: we are looking into a rosy future, the prospect of good times lies ahead of us and from the ashes and ruins new, beautiful sights will emerge.

Deniz Alt populates his depictions of wrecks and ruins with human figures that appear intentionally incomplete and sketched to symbolize their character of a transitional world that is always in motion. In some cases he reproduces main characters from paintings by old masters on his canvases, which, like fleeting ghosts, point the viewer to the fictional nature of his work and art. The artist takes up this metaphor further by transferring the first group of works into his second and placing his own works on the walls of Frankfurt's museums. We witness a Deniz Alt exhibition twice: both in the real space and the painted fiction on the canvas that we are looking at. In doing so, we reflect and mirror the painted figures in the space who are looking at the artist's work or attending a fashion show. The city of Frankfurt is the focus of the depiction as a local reference.

As the second main theme of his work, Deniz Alt has chosen the city of Frankfurt, with its recognizable landmarks, which are normally so full of life and activity and now lie before us as if floating in time. Buildings and architecture emerge from a misty background and can only be recognized upon closer inspection, moving between abstraction and reality. These very real spaces pause, stand still, and yet the movement and speed associated with them in everyday life is conveyed by the artist's technique of representation.

Installation Views: Credits Daniel Beyer