You can smell Florian Krewer’s paintings before you get a close look at them, so thickly layered are they with oils. It’s not hard to imagine the scent of sweat wafting from their roiling, nocturnal scenes of male camaraderie and confrontation. The painter’s first US solo museum exhibition, ‘everybody rise’, opens with several such works, completed not long after he graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he was mentored by Peter Doig. The influence of the older artist is easy to see in Krewer’s de-skilled figuration, submerged beneath raw, youthful aggression. The connection is often stressed in press accounts of Krewer’s ascent from house painter in the working-class suburbs of North Rhine-Westphalia to art-market darling, such that it’s tempting to approach his display in one of North America’s toniest small-town museums with a degree of cynicism; but something far stranger and more ambiguous is at work here.
