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A GENTLEMAN’S FANCIES
Selected artworks from the exhibition 31 August — 25 September
1999
Room 35, Sydney
An exhibition of 33
ink and collage drawings, including 1 drawing and 4 collaborative
drawings (with the artist Joe Frost) produced for the limited edition
book Afternoon Square, published 1997.
Project sponsored by a Pat Corrigan Artist Grant, managed by NAVA
with financial assistance from the Australia Council.
Schranzer turns the coldness of the conventions
of technical drawing into delights of earnest-humour. The industrial
metaphors of male sexuality are pleasures of wit and innovation…
innuendoes of pipe work, shafts, screws, and orifices. … Schranzer’s
tongue is often firmly planted in a cheek.
Quoted from Evan Brooks, artist, unpublished essay, Sydney 1997
Technical manuals from early this century are
the unlikely source material for Kurt Schranzer’s series of
collages, which are at once comic and unsettling. The displaced
imagery has been utilised to create diverse themes with a common
visual thread — homo-eroticism collides with avian and marine
motifs.
Quoted from 'Diary', Sydney Star Observer, Thursday 2nd
September 1999
Schranzer finds great stimulus and excitement
in using and sourcing collage. It is an exploration, a game... of
memory... locating, seizing, pairing the unrelated... thinking laterally,
openly, associatively. He is also intrigued by the characteristics
and metaphysical qualities which are inherent within elements, but
which are not operational within the source material while still
in book form (a turbine, dislocated from text, is really the sea-diving-helmet
of a gladiator; a pulley a bird's head). Elements are disassociated
from their original contexts to cancel out the separate fields of
meaning of the constitutional parts, or are rearranged so that the
new form still has overtones of original meaning, giving a paradoxical
vision, a displacement of meaning. This displacement assists the
works in being comic or burlesque, though they also resound with
more melancholic or mysterious utterances. Present, too, are erotic
tensions.
Excerpt from the Press Release for A Gentleman’s Fancies,
August 1999
The artworks of Kurt Schranzer (b.1965) combine
line drawing with collage in a manner reminiscent of the great tradition
of European graphic arts… [yet] are unlike anything you have
seen before. Schranzer’s works perform a delicate balancing
act. Combining severe graphic renditions of obsolescent objects
and machine or electrical parts sourced from technical manuals from
the early 1900s with fluent, even capricious passages of ink and
pencil drawing, the artist manages to conjure up graphic representations
of his silent, subliminal thoughts. Chance and the mysterious machinations
of the unconscious play a big part in the final results, which are
often of a sexual or highly personal nature. In a recent series
of collages, for instance, the combinations of machine parts and
minimal lines alludes to sexual acts and organs, while other works
become prompts for thoughts about the isolation of living in an
urban environment or the disappearance of nature. … he is
one of the best kept secrets in Australian graphic arts.
Quoted from Benjamin Genocchio, 'Smart Art', Australian Art
Collector, issue 14 October-December 2000, Sydney
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