DICHTER-ZEICHNER
Selected artworks from the exhibition 16 September — 11 October 1997
Room 35, Sydney

An exhibition of 69 drawings.
Publication: Kurt Schranzer, Dichter-Zeichner, 1997, Sydney. Catalogue essay, 69 b+w images, 62 pp. ISBN 0 646 32353 9.

[In] Room 35… is Dichter-Zeichner or Poet-Drawer, a suite of expert contour drawings by Penrith-born Kurt Schranzer. Steeped in the orotund cadences of European metaphysical art, Schranzer’s work also has its own flattened Australian intonation.
Quoted from Bruce James, 'Galleries', Sydney Morning Herald, Friday 19th September 1997

His exhibition, Dichter-Zeichner… is exceptional in every sense. It consists of 69 drawings in black pen on white paper. Depthless and toneless, they’re the perfect foil to Anger’s barking colour, resembling a sort of charming cross between technical drawing and telephone pad whimsy. … His works are sharp, the visual equivalent of good epigrams. One title speaks for the lot: ‘What shall I love if not the enigma?’
Quoted from Sebastian Smee, 'Vanitas Fair', Sydney Morning Herald, Friday 26th September 1997

The relationship between the titles of his drawings and the images themselves is often amusing, with strange forms making sense once titled, or ordinary-looking forms given a surreal twist with a puzzling title. Schranzer’s inspiration comes from many sources, including other ‘poet-drawers’ such as Paul Klee, Jean Arp, and Jean Cocteau.
Quoted from 'Lines of Poetry', Capital Q Weekly, Friday 12th September 1997, Sydney

Dichter-Zeichner ('Poet-Drawer') quotes a Paul Klee drawing from 1915. It is an apposite name for Schranzer. Like his luminary Klee, Schranzer uses the title to lay open his intention. Within a drawing, the visual form is clue to the title, and the title is clue to the visual form, which is clue to the content. It is a modus of operation based on a definition of language and visual structure as counterpoint, not as exclusive and immutable entities. It is two melodies making a harmonic, poetic whole. … Schranzer's works are also posited within the poetic-graphic traditions of artists such as Jean Cocteau, Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, and Federico Garciá Lorca. The output of these artists includes both writing and visual art (not always known in the case of de Chirico's writing or Lorca's drawing). For Schranzer, the appeal of their poetry of language and visual forms is strong. … The poetry of Schranzer's drawings is the poetry of dualities and multiplicities: [they] are often puzzling or paradoxical, beguiling, contradictory, and have many functions and interpretations. … Sailors abound as homo-erotic archetypes of the masculine, but their potency might be removed by castration, decapitation, or dismemberment. Precociously sexual youths confront alter-images of the malformed and sexually dysfunctional. Ships float calmly out to sea, or are beached or sunk. Birds are caught, diced, poisoned; one bird finds itself smashed against the lighthouse dome that promised to give safety and clarity in a dark world. Carnivorous flowers are both beautiful and deadly—so is the bombshell-youth. … The pictorial language used by Schranzer—a reflection of his affinity with Klee, the Bauhaus, and Surrealism—is also centred in the vocabulary of technical drawing systems; French-curved lines, projected forms, sectioned objects, and templated ellipses abound. … Schranzer, however, toys with and transcends the medium, and humours the traditional means in which his instruments are used. In the hands of the utilitarian, the French curve would be a means to describe some greater shape or form, and though Schranzer will use the curve in this manner, he is also pleased to allow the curve, or parts thereof, to describe and be scribed in its own shape. This reflects the beauty of the curve's shape, but further allows the curve to take on an inherent metaphysical life: the head of a horse; the hull of a boat; a crashing wave.
Excerpts from the book Dichter-Zeichner, published to coincide with the exhibition, 1997, Sydney