Leo Koenig Gallery Kicks Off the Season with Paint Your Life

Leo Koenig Gallery Kicks Off the Season with Paint Your Life

By Robert Brune

     At the Leo Koenig Gallery in Andes, a new group show traverses time and genres to feature both world-class and emerging artists, many of whom continue to live and work in the region. United by the theme “Paint Your Life,” the exhibition offers a vision of the physical, material and inner worlds of the artists on view.

     At the centerpiece of this exhibition is a masterwork of German Neo-Expressionism by the late Jörg Immendorff. The work, Café de Flore, is an homage painting bursting with energy, an imagined gathering of German artists, gallerists, and intellectuals within Immendorff’s physical and psychic orbit. Transporting them all to another center of intellectual fervor—Paris and the Café de Flore—this large-format oil painting invites the viewer to identify Immendorff’s lineage of influence. Is that Max Ernst? Marcel Duchamp? Otto Dix? Günter Grass? Immendorff himself appears three times in the composition—as a central figure, a waiter, and a patron of the café.

     The painting emerged from the collection of gallery owner Leo Koenig  whose own father, the late, Kasper König, one of Germany’s foremost gallerists, is painted into the frame. This familial connection, along with Koenig’s long residency in Andes, offers a strong link to both the region and the exhibition’s theme, “Paint Your Life.”

     Curator Ryan Steadman used the Immendorff painting as the starting point in assembling the show and raided not only Koenig’s coffers but other private collections  as well as artists’ studios and museums to realize his theme.  The concept came to him in the post-pandemic period, as he increasingly noticed the subjectivity of the work and the subtle and radical changes artists’ practices had undergone.

    “That period represented a return to basic things,” says Steadman. “Things that many artists had not had to think about before. Where am I going to get my food? How will I sustain human connection? I recognized the irony in that. Many people must worry about those things all the time. Seeing this in this context gave me a wide umbrella to choose painters painting their own lives.”

     Two works in the exhibition sharply illustrate this awareness of disparity and lived experience. One is a highly textured cityscape by Jimmy Lee Sudduth, created with materials found around his Alabama home: mud mixed with sugar water, plants, coffee grounds, soot, and axle grease. Sudduth’s work is often termed “self-taught” or “Outsider Art,” but it defies categorization and has been praised for its handling of materials, composition, and results. His work is held in the permanent collections of such places as the Smithsonian Institution and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

    Another featured artist is the late Delhi-based Laverne Kelly, who farmed his family land in Otego and carved the tools and machines of his own life. On view are Kelly’s carved trucks, first reflecting the job of hauling food supplies to market and then, as farming in the region slowly disappeared, logging trucks when the family turned to lumber.

     There is also a deep sense of regional history and connection throughout the exhibition. Louisa Matthíasdóttir’s spare yet vivid landscapes, composed of bold blocks of color, echo the Icelandic upbringing of the artist, who transplanted herself to Delhi, New York, in the late 20th century, where her daughter still lives. In putting the show together, Steadman had long admired Matthíasdóttir’s work but was unaware of the Delhi connection. “This made it a perfect fit,” he says.

       Outstanding works by current artists include paintings by Alexander Harrison and Emily Pettigrew. Harrison, born in South Carolina and now living in New York, creates work that harkens back to his upbringing. One of his displayed works, “Spring and Fall” shows two sets of black cowboys’ legs exuberantly tumbling over a stone wall.  In contrast, Pettigrew’s sparse, stripped down pieces created in nearby Delhi, depict quiet moments imbued with mystery.

      The Leo Koenig Gallery is a relative newcomer to the Catskill art scene but has long been a mainstay of the international art world. Koenig found a home in Andes 20 years ago, and his father Kasper would often visit from Germany. The gallery occupies a space formerly used as a Mexican restaurant and, long before that, a dry goods store.

“My father and I would eat here when it was a restaurant,” says Koenig. “He liked this area. It reminded him of fly fishing in Germany. One time while we were eating, my father looked around and said, ‘If this place ever becomes available, you must take it and make it your gallery.’”

       Koenig took his father’s words to heart. Three years ago, he acquired the Greek Revival building and renovated it over a two-year period. It opened as the Leo Koenig Gallery last year and since then this two story, light filled gallery  has hosted exhibitions featuring major artists such as Gerhard Richter, Wolfgang Tillmans, Richard Serra, and in the current show, Nicole Eisenman, whom Koenig supported early in her career.

“Paint Your Life”  continues through July 26.