The location of Gustav Kluge’s paintings is an experiential realm that lies somewhere between external reality and the unconscious. Here, isolated figures swim about in an impastoed sea of petit bourgeois experiences—petit bourgeois in this case having nothing to do with class-specific behavior but rather with the generation of our lives into trivialities. One of the most striking works at Zwirner showed a small, rather helpless-looking female creature carrying an enormous black male figure like a club through a landscape of paint. Entitled Der Spielgefährte (The playmate, 1985–86), this is an