Haut, Haare, Holz at Galerie Schloss Parz

Galerie Schloss Parz: Haut,Holz, Haare Interior view Image Courtesy Galerie Schloss Parz

By DAVID JAGER March 10, 2025

Skin, Hair, Wood

Suzanne Levesque, Laura Eckhert, Isa Stein

Galerie Schloss Parz, Upper Austrian Center for the Arts

Kunstzentrum OG
Parz 1
4710 Grieskirchen
Austria

‘Haut, Haare, Holz’ or ‘Skin, Hair, Wood’ is a three person show currently at the historic castle of Galerie Schloss Parz, a vast, museum sized venue settled in a scenic area of upper Austria. Originally established as a cultural center in 1960 by the abstractionist Hans Hoffman-Ybbs and his partner Charlotte Buck, it has since been helmed by Jacinta Mossenbock and her brother Laurenz Pottinger. Carrying on in the tradition of Hoffman-Ybbs, one of the leading post war artists in Austria, painting has always remained a focus of the gallery, which also represents Erin Wurm, Christian Attersee (recently shown at O’Flaherty’s), and Vienna Actionist Hermann Nitsch. 

It's no surprise, then, that the haunting and compellingly strong paintings of Suzanne Levesque form the lion’s share of the current show. A young painter of astonishing range and skill, Levesque appears poised to become an international star in her own right. Like other contemporary artists using the human body- Danica Lundy’s complex multidimensional figures come to mind- Levesque’s figures are situated not so much in actual space as they are in an imaginal swamp. Her paintings do not live on the surface, but present rather as murky reservoirs where fragments of memory and figuration float up from the depths and into view. 

This is part of the reason, I think, for the decidedly sooty palette, based on a clinical greyness Levesque has described in interviews as ‘Eigengrau’, or the neutral grey-generated solely by the mind-that human eyes will evenutally see in the absence of light. Each canvas intuitively mines both the mechanics and the experience of vision, or vision viewed from 'both sides'. She plumbs the idiosyncracies inherent in the act of seeing, in other words, guided by something deeper than mere compositional decision making. Levesque’s paintings are awash in subliminal energies that plumb the occult ways the human body, memory and experience intersect.

 Suzanne Levesque: "La Pumpa" Oil on Linen with Mixed Media 2025  150 X 280 cm Image Courtesy Galerie Schloss Partz 
 

Take the three female figures, suspended spider like, in the painting “La Pumpa”. The women hang suspended but also evoke the position of frogs seen from below. They are both intimate and clinical, navigating a tense line between the sensual and the abject not seen since Georg Baselitz (disregarding his obnoxious remark that women cannot truly paint). Green braided ropes hang at intervals over the canvas, adding to the intrigue.

This is partly what makes Levesque’s work compelling. It contains so many partial objects and floating signifiers they amount to a Lacanian analyst’s wet dream. “Two Heads and the Thing That Won’t Leave” is haunted by a ghost tongue that protrudes from the cheek of one and upwards into the other. Why is it displaced, and what is it doing there? “Blooming Onion” has the eponymous onion unfolding greasily in the lower left corner, but a child’s face floats above it, forcibly constrained by a meaty hand belonging to a mother. She in turn cranes her face towards a second child in either affection or outright menace. Punctuating the ambiguity are a pair of tiny abortive pig fetuses, floating behind her above the half-realized Kitchen counter.

"Blooming (Onion)" 2024 Oil on hand-stitched linen with polyester silk, 120 X 140 cm  Image Courtesy Galerie Schloss Parz 
 

At times Levesque’s desire to deconstruct the relationship between mind and image invades the canvas itself, prompting her to stitch together actual fragments of linen and other material. Levesque has said elsewhere that this a reference to time, of existence truncated into fragments. “Love (Ordinary Situations)”, is obsessively broken into dozens of such stitched pieces, taking an expressive mouth and breaking it down into cinematic strips. It could be a scientific study, nearly, but it also appears entirely private, giving us a  window into the semi-conscious expressions of a solitary child.  One's social face and private face are both exhaustingly performed and unconsciously rehearsed, in other words, a back and forth not unlike tennis. In “Plump Squirm”, the exhaustion of the self turns the canvas into nearly discarded, pillowy, sloughed off skin, draped over the frame itself.

Yet none of this would hold together without the absolute assurance of her hand. Her diptych “To and Fro”, with its two grinning ‘Meg’ figures, is Levesque at her most restrained. It also shows the deep imprint of Northern German Mannerism on her figurative elements: Mathias Grunewald and Lucas Cranach come to mind. The ironic distortion nearly recalls the similar distorted jokiness of John Currin or Lisa Yuskevage, though in Levesque her use of technique reaches for something meatier and more deeply affective.

Love (Ordinary Situations), 2025 Oil on hand-stitched Linen and Polyester silk, 175 X165 cm Image Courtesy Galerie Schloss Parz
 

If Levesque’s stitched canvases and figures are the skin, then Laura Eckert, who sculptures are hand hewn from tree trunks, is the wood. At once figurative and deconstructed in a matter that rhymes with Levesque’s own approach, she works entirely in the realm of self-portraiture, with elements of collage and bric a brac. NN45 is one such face eroded in half, much in the manner of Levesque’s partial fragmentary figures. Walking around it you can see an abstract profusion of small pieces of wood nailed together, whether allegorical or made to balance the haunting realism of the half face is uncertain. There is also a desire to incorporate the organic tendencies of her material. Her bust “Root" is probably the best example of this, leaving the wild shape of an oak root intact enough to inform the face that emerges from the bottom.
 

Laura Eckert Root 2024. Yew, Oak Parquet, Wax, Plaster, Chalk 67 X 40 cm Image Courtesy Galerie Schloss Parz

Eckert branches out into other materials that explore raw form as a progenitor of the figure, such as her cast bronze semi abstraction, “Meta 1” which is thickly slathered with satisfying kinetic torsion and weight, nearly reminiscent of Thomas Schutte’s similar bronzes. A pair of carved oak sculptural legs, “Walk”, is a marvelous combination of the abstracted- the legs have rectangular tessellations that recall Lego, but are still compellingly organic and human. Like Levesque, Eckert appears to revel in the liminal ambiguity that happens in the transition from conception to material to art object.

Less intriguing are the paintings of Isa Stein, who paints abstractions directly with her hair. A performative body artist in the tradition of Carollee Schneeman, Stein’s use of her body as a brush are also reminiscent of Jarret Key, a New York artist who also uses his hair to paint. Aside from the novelty of application- Stein is also known to twirl about nude and fling paint with her tresses- she mostly expresses a dated calligraphic sixties sensibility pushed ahead with unwavering ambition. The “After the War” series, which marries her black splashes and scrawls with solid red, yellow and green Backgrounds, pack the most visual wallop. Combined with black and white photos of her performance, conducted on a winter lake, it is a throwback to a more innocent era of body art that translates thinly to the present.

Isa Stein "After The War", 2025 Ink and Acrylic on Canvas 100 X 70 Image Courtesy Galerie Schloss Parz
 

With this handsome, retrospective sized show featuring the best European emerging painting and sculpture, Schloss Parz has established itself as a notable destination for contemporary art lovers who wish to keep their finger on the pulse of the European scene. WM