Florian Krewer: ‘Painting allows me to show love and desire’

Florian Krewer’s paintings may, and often do, contain scenes of a sexual nature. They are peopled by bodies in action, by flesh tones and pink orifices, and sometimes also by animals leaping between limbs, or out of groins. There is a young man with owls for feet; there are tigers. “Tigers show that you can be strong and determined in your life,” says Krewer (pronounced “Krever”). “Humans have too many rules. When I see animals, they just go with their instincts.” He is in his studio in the South Bronx, and behind him is a new painting of something yellow hunkering down against a pulsating blue night sky. “It’s a hawk,” says Krewer. “I saw it in the street the other day.”

Krewer, at 34, is one of a new generation of figurative painters, in his case using the genre to dive deeply into contemporary life. With his multiple tattoos — his neck is ringed with the words “Ride or Fly”, and there are decorations on his eyelids as well as other hidden embellishments all over his body — he is something of an artwork himself, both in real life and as the subject of many of his pictures. What does Ride and Fly mean? I ask. “Oh, it means: be positive,” he says, his eyelid tattoos disappearing in the crinkle of a smile. “Whatever the situation is, just be positive.”

At his current exhibition at Michael Werner in London, he is right at the centre of the action, with men, women and those beyond or outside gender, demonstrating a sexual identity that acknowledges no boundaries. “I need to accept myself as I am,” he says. “And painting allows me to show love and desire. When I’m making my work, I just see it as my private thing, my freedom, my space.” 

I love the shape of the girls — I’d love to have a girl’s body — but it’s the male silhouette that I like

Krewer came to attention from the late 2010s with works that dealt with an edgy masculinity, often showing groups of boys hanging around in the darkness of night, their tense and over-alert body language more a demonstration of anxiety and powerlessness than machismo. In their tracksuits and sneakers, beanies and bumbags, they could be street kids or students — casual streetwear is the uniform of both the less privileged and the fashionable middle-class, after all. They could be about to fight or have sex. “I love to paint the outline of a man’s body,” says Krewer, who works in a flat, vignetted way. “I love the shape of the girls — I’d love to have a girl’s body — but it’s the male silhouette that I like.” 

In particular, they came to the attention of François Pinault, and a suite of six huge paintings of chaotically aggressive youths have been on show at the fashion magnate’s Bourse de Commerce since it opened in Paris in May this year. Set against deep inky black or the crimson colour of blood, boys flail through the sad motions of street fighting. Installed on the floor in two triangular arrangements, Krewer’s contribution is surrounded by works from the late great Martin Kippenberger and seminal sculptures by Thomas Schütte, two greatly feted fellow Germans. The installation suggests that the work was helicoptered in at the last minute, well after there was any space left on the walls.

Krewer grew up in Westphalia, an easily distracted school student who left education at 16 and started an apprenticeship as a house painter. “I was always making jokes and being kicked out of lessons,” he says. There was no art in his life, in lessons or on walls. “We were taken on visits to museums when we were seven years old. When we were too young to be interested.”

Quickly realising that house-painting was not going to fulfil him long-term, Krewer secured a place at Cologne University to study architecture. And there, as part of a drawing class, he started to paint. “The material was amazing,” he says of paint itself. “Fluid and fascinating to me.” By age 24, he was studying fine art at the famous Düsseldorf Art Academy, the alma mater of artists from Joseph Beuys to Gerhard Richter, and by 25 was under the professorship of Peter Doig, who has become his most sustained mentor. By 30, he was making money from his art, though he continued to do the two-day-a-week job in an architect’s office that had seen him through college. “I still wasn’t convinced I could do this forever,” he says. “That I could seriously make a living from painting.” (Works now sell for up to $85,000.)

Doig’s influence is more than apparent in Krewer’s work — in the elimination of detail; the openness of narrative. But where Doig can maintain an objective distance, Krewer is at the very heart of his work, throwing up no filters, pulling the viewer right in. Like another German, Wolfgang Tillmans, who photographed his friends and squatty flats, Krewer has no problem putting his ragged life on show. His hero is Goya and you could say he makes his own Los Caprichos, detailing some of the decadence of our times. With Francis Bacon, clearly another influence, he shares the heat of male sexual desire, as well as the centrality of the studio to his very existence.

His own studio is on the sixth floor of an industrial building containing no other artists, a 15-minute bike ride from his apartment. “It’s so isolated and quiet. It’s my universe,” he says. He arrived here in February 2020, an escape from Düsseldorf, straight into the eye of the Covid storm. After six weeks of being sick himself, he discovered a local underground scene of drag shows, raves and apartment parties. But he’s back at the canvas every morning. “If I’m not in the studio, I get nervous,” he says. “It’s good therapy for me to be there and I love the challenge of painting. If I didn’t have that, I’d wonder what I was doing in the world.” 

To November 13, michaelwerner.com