MAXIM GUNGA

Every moment is absolute, everything is contained in it. You just have to perceive it, otherwise it is already gone, vanished.  Gunga’s painting is about the futility of capturing the moment – and the utopian and speculative power that lies in this futile attempt. There is always the possibility of paradise, as in ‘Tiere beim Spielen gestört’ (2023), a jungle idyll reminiscent of Henri Rousseau, in which predators, snakes, a flamingo, a gorilla and a koala play in paradisiacal harmony, but are startled by the viewer’s gaze. 

There is always this analogy between animal and human society, the idea of a primal state that we can find anywhere, anytime.   Clubs, parks, trams and dark rooms are transformed into spiritual, sexual and ecological biotopes, into fields of experimentation. Gunga shows moments from the Lab, Berghain’s gay sex club, as casually and tenderly as scenes on the street, in the underground or by the sea. Everything is an expression of a vital energy that constantly enters new states of aggregation. 

He seems to draw directly from the legacy of post-war Expressionist and Neo-Expressionist painting, Art Brut, the CoBrA group, the early Georg Baselitz, Markus Lüpertz, Karl Horst Hödicke. Of course, the electrified, sexual, urban energy is also reminiscent of the painting of the so-called “Neue Wilde”, Rainer Fetting, Salomé, Helmut Middendorf. There is certainly a strong affinity, and Gunga can certainly be seen as a descendant of these traditions. An essential aspect of his artistic practice is his engagement with early modernism, especially Fauvism, van Gogh and Matisse. The connection with religious art, folk art and the painting of self-taught artists, visionaries and outsiders also plays an important role. In ‘Joseph’s Dream of the Eleven Ears of Corn’ (2020), Gunga refers to the Old Testament visionary story of Joseph in the Book of Genesis. The painting was created during a residency at the Worpswede Artists’ Houses and engages in a dialogue with Paula Modersohn and Reiner Rilke. Joseph, a former slave and dream interpreter, hovers like a visionary prophet or angel over a field of corn, over the material world that bows down to him. 

In his large-format “Sauna” (2024), Gunga echoes the elevated, distorted perspective of one of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings: “The Night Café” (1888). Van Gogh painted the interior of the Café de la Gare in Arles. He wrote: “I have tried to express the terrible human passions with red and green. The room is blood-red and dull yellow, a green billiard table in the middle, four lemon-yellow lamps with orange and green circles of light. Everywhere there is struggle and antithesis”.  Gunga, for whom colours have a similarly fundamental meaning, shows a mixed sauna, again as a kind of antithesis to van Gogh’s café: a non-binary place of warmth, healing and community.  And not just between people and genders, but also between people and animals, who are merging in some of the bodies. Gunga’s painting is also so bold because it allows for regressive, almost childlike, sometimes even destructive affects, only to counter them with precise, controlled painterly choices and comments on the history of painting. In doing so, he takes the patriarchal thinking of modernism and transforms it into a multi-perspective, fluid and at the same time absolutely urgent form of gestural expression for the 21st century