Nina Horvitz Galerie is pleased to present Cockaigne, an exhibition that envelops viewers in Susanne Kühn’s vivid, visionary worlds.
Through paintings, works on paper, and ceramics, Susanne Kühn creates complex visual fields where familiar forms are subtly estranged, inviting viewers to trace unexpected relationships between objects, bodies, and imagery.
The works in Cockaigne exemplify Kühn's ongoing exploration of composition and painterly language. Rather than treating each canvas as an autonomous entity, the artist conceived an initial group of eleven paintings as a single, expansive pictorial field. A translucent purple imprimatura establishes an atmospheric ground, upon which layers of marks and motifs are superimposed, coexisting without a unified formal or narrative structure.
Across this field appear linear landscapes in pale green, hybrid arboreal forms in pink, sculptural shapes, and diffuse fog-like clouds. Fragments of dollhouse architecture, monochromatic leaves, nineteenth-century faience vessels, and isolated human hands further populate the works. Each element functions as a visual citation, referencing digital pixelation, biological hybridity, childhood imagination, and the histories of craft, ornament, and wealth. Kühn describes this method as a “cocktail”: a complex amalgamation that resists fixed interpretation and rewards attentive viewing.
This painterly investigation extends into three dimensions through Kühn’s ceramics, which act as companions to the paintings, materially grounding and conceptually expanding the compositions. Complementing both media are her works on paper, which emphasize gesture, line, and the interplay between surface and space.
The exhibition’s title, Cockaigne, alludes to the medieval myth of a land of abundance and indulgence while simultaneously evoking, through its phonetic similarity to “cocaine,” the seductive yet destabilizing qualities of hyperreal contemporary imagery. This duality between attraction and disorientation is central to Kühn’s practice. Rather than conveying a singular message, the works invite viewers to navigate intricate visual relationships and layered complexities across media.
Susanne Kühn (b. 1969, Leipzig, Germany) lives and works in Freiburg and Nuremberg. She earned her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig in 1995 and studied in New York on a DAAD postgraduate grant at the School of Visual Arts and Hunter College (1995–1996). She was a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2001–2002) and a Harvard Radcliffe Summer Fellow (2021). Since 2015, she has been Professor and Chair of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg.
Her work has been featured in major solo exhibitions including Turtle Quest at Bluerider Art, Taipei (2025), Susanne Kühn at Galerie der Stadt Backnang (2025), Profliferation – Vasa, Auginella & other Sprouts at Galerie für Gegenwartskunst, Freiburg (2022), BOSCH & KÜHN at Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Vienna (2019), and Susanne Kühn at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2008). Selected group exhibitions include From Sea To Sky at The Blue Axis, Bluerider Art, Los Angeles (2025) and Being a Woman Artist at Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg (2023–2024).
Kühn’s work can be found in important public and private collections, including the Harvard Radcliffe Institute/Busch-Reisinger Museum Collection in Boston, the Kemper Museum in Kansas City, the Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg, the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, and the Deutsche Bundesbank Collection in Frankfurt, among others.