Fedor Deichmann: Prajna

September 10 - October 11, 2024

The Pit Palm Springs

The Pit is pleased to present “Prajna,” a solo exhibition of new works by German-born, Los Angeles-based artist Fedor Deichmann, his first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from September 10 until October 11, 2024. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Saturday September 14, 2024 from 5-7 pm.

One does not need Wassily Kandinsky’s synesthesia or even to know that the painting’s title is borrowed from a symphony by Paul Hindemith to see music in Deichmann’s mesmerizing six-foot-tall Mathis der Maler. Traversing legato planes, sweeping gestural lines, and restless staccato brushstrokes reify the reach and resonance of a musical score. Synthesizing the harmonic and dissonant, the painting evinces a striking emotional dimensionality that spans the registers from ecstasy to agony.

As with Kandinsky, Deichmann believes that art should not strive to represent the outward appearance of things as much as their inward significance. His process begins not with a sketch or a clear image in his head but rather with the contours of a feeling. Working through layers, he builds up his oils, often straight from the tube, until they assume a convincing sculptural extensity. Then, using a palette knife, he peels back, scrapes, and otherwise rends the surface veneer, excavating colors like layers of sedimentary.

Deichmann's willingness to relinquish a certain level of control and respond instead to his materials' malleability, amplitude, and resistance gives the work its dynamism. Engaging with the unknown, he invites his unconscious to intervene and instigate moments of contradiction, paradox. The insistence on discordance opens and enlarges one’s impression of the imagery, rendering the canvases physically and emotionally expansive. At the same time, their irresolution asserts the need for imaginative investment and staid attention.

In Mathis der Maler, for example, smooth, marbled pastels abut strident white contours, primary colors, and abrasive sgraffito. Similarly, lyrical figurations of outstretched arms and long-stem roses are surrounded by spontaneous, expressionistic gestures and painterly textures. The composition resembles a montage of discrete impressions or the entirety of a chronological narrative collapsed onto a single plane. What’s invisible—emotion, spirit, energy—overwhelms the concrete and tangible, recalling the conditions of subjective reality.

A similar negotiation between abstraction and representation can be found in his variations on insects and animals, which bear only tenuous links to their sentient subjects. The ambiguous, rough-hewn forms that emerge from the vibrant color fields are both grotesque and mundane. Like a visual mondegreen, the incarnadine figure in At The Ant Nest first appears as the flayed carcass of a mammal in the same vein as Francis Bacon’s butcher meat until further examination reveals an antennae and an uncanny eye. The impasto form in the middle of the Great Grey Wolf precipitates a similar illusion, eliciting images of the wolf’s prey as much as the wolf itself. Taken together, the character’s fable-like familiarity and gross disfiguration contribute to a kind of Kafkaesque absurdity.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, figures are entirely replaced by gestures. Color, velocity, and direction become the sole arbiters of meaning. In Fragments of a Mood, flashes of yellow, cerulean dashes, and gashes of red that bleed past their borderline constellate an ink-black sky. While in Oxherding, thick lines of peony pink and evergreen meander around the canvas, mixing with shades of yellow, black, and mahogany.

As further evidence of the exhibition's symphonic resonance, these smaller works register as refrains from the larger: bits of melody that will stay in your head long after you’ve left. –Tara Anne Dalbow

“I am humbled to dedicate this exhibition, which is the first solo presentation of my work in America, to my late father Professor Felix Deichmann (1936-2010) and Musical Observations Inc, the nonprofit organization founded by Paul Zukofsky. I am grateful to my father for showing me the pleasures of painting at a young age, keeping me excited ever since. And I am also thankful for Musical Observations Inc. for supporting my education at ArtCenter, without which I would not be the artist I am today.” — Fedor Deichmann

For further information, please contact the gallery at info@the-pit.la.

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