The works for the third solo show by Steffen Lenk at Diane Kruse travel from Märkisches Museum Witten to Hamburg from an exhibition called „My kind of Disneyland“ curated by Steffen Lenk with works by himself, Tatjana Doll, Pia Fries, Fabian Marcaccio, Richard Allen Morris, David Reed, Gert and Uwe Tobias, Günter Umberg and others.
 
Steffen Lenk is a classically educated painter who does exactly the opposite of what he was taught. Formally he paints in a really traditional way on almost pretty small canvases treated with tons of oil paint – even though they grew bigger lately on the way of practising. Also Steffen Lenk loves to „paint“ objects made out of oil paint. With the help of wire constructions underneath they become little sculptures. The things that Steffen Lenk assembles are colourful as well as beautiful and definitely larger than life, even though they are of tiny shape. And they are always a battle of material.
 
With regard to contents however this artistic position is way less classical but rather outmost contemporary. Lenk´s art apparently wants to embrace everything: High and low, singularity and mass production, beauty and the beast, plastic and oil paint. Behind this artistic dictum hides a doubtfully and at the same time euphoric attitude towards the world that shows up in Janus-faced PEZ-toys, a pastose painted full-scale and indeed -depth beef steak on painted fake-squared paper, Walt Disney´s Huey, Dewey, and Louie as skeletal miniatures drinking beer on a merry-go-round or – extremely to the point – a small canvas with applied Gothic print saying „It´s only Malerei but I like it“. Again and again themes from the Black Forest, Western contexts, Gothic and the world of Tattoos emerge – all of them point to Lenk´s home and respectively his current environment. It´s a culture that even gives ratbags like Hell´s Angel Ronny Barger or serial killer Charles Manson as laughing stocks the runaround.
 
Thanks to Lenk´s ambiguous handling regarding the origins of his choice these works seem stunningly lucent in face of these loads of paint stacked on the canvases. While riding through the deep furrows of his fields of colour Van Gogh may sit in the saddle and the huge sailing vessel „Alexander von Humboldt“ from the Beck´s beer ad ploughs through the pastose froth on the horizon. Superblondes wearing camouflage dresses sprawl underneath a proper Gerhard Richter-heaven coated with a doctor knife. Alongside Pin-Up-Girls crouch down with a petrified and distorted face in front of a Mondrian floating like a Science Fiction-Vision inside the image space. Lenk deconstructs every single work within itself: he paints and scrutinizes his action at the same time. And so he assimilates a moment of efficient uncertainty into every painting or object. His works are abstract and representational at the same time.
 
The herefrom emerging picture-world ultimately kills antagonisms like „abstract“ versus „figurative“ or „high“ versus „low“. What seems striking and not very subtle at first sight proves to be an outmost up-to-date kind of painting if you look closer and think about it. Because it celebrates the past formally and immediately boosts it up with subversive humour. With regards to content these works frequently make us laugh out loud but in the same second this laugh freezes on our faces for the sort of mirror that we face here shows a living environment that is flat, flashy and for this reason bitter on the one hand and unfortunately real on the other hand. As long as this is interfered so passionate and enthusiastic it hits us right in the face.
 
This is possible because Lenk loves painting. Not as superpower of art history or elitist Interior Design for the Happy Few. No, he loves painting like Quentin Tarantino loves cinema: keen, greedy and obsessed with those fallacious stories you are able to tell when you release those long-forgotten and presumed dead revenants from visual everyday culture towards the canon of painting of the 20th century. You can also call it Pulp Painting. A Meta-B-Movie in oil paint – from a fan for the fans. For Lenk white trash is a question of attitude. Wherever pulp-types of pop reverse ordinariness into grotesqueness with plenty of dilettantism, irony and specific intellectual overload of conventional codes Lenk concentrates to unhinge the conventions of painting with own resources. The outcome is analytic painting with impetuous esprit that treats every cited (tin) god from Gerhard Richter to Bob Ross equally. This is not only more than fair, it is also a highly philanthropic approach from Lenk, the wily fox, who has a nearly full body tattoo and just wants to reflect the world, do paintings and shows.
 
Steffen Lenk was born in 1976, lives in Berlin and studied at Staatliche Akademie für Bildende Künste in Karlsruhe in the classes of Silvia Bächli, Ernst Caramelle and Günter Umberg whose master student he was. In 2005 Lenk received the art price of Kunstverein Freiburg. His works were shown in numerous solo- and group presentations, for example at Galleries Rolf Ricke and SchmidtMaczollek Cologne, at Kunstverein Pforzheim, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, Columbus Art Foundation Ravensburg or Von der Heydt Museum Wuppertal.