The Understated Relentlessness of Florian Krewer’s Paintings

Strange and exhilarating things have been known to occur in Florian Krewer’s paintings. Under purple or blood-orange skies, young men take to the streets or dance—alluring, invincible. Dogs roam, tigers battle, and owls alight on someone’s feet like it’s the most natural thing in the world. A few years ago, naked figures appeared in poses that can only be described as pornographic. “I don’t do what people want to see,” he says.

Early one summer morning, the German painter is in his cavernous studio high up in a Bronx industrial building, discussing his resistance to being pigeonholed. He’s surrounded by a bunch of new pictures, with his signature rough planes of flat color and shocking hues, to be shown at Michael Werner Gallery in New York from September 4. Krewer, 38, is wiry, with tattoos across his arms and face. He’s wearing a blue Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap, a T-shirt, and Vans. There are a few canvases sitting on the ground that he’s recently primed, a process that he half-jokingly says reminds him of his early years as a house painter in Germany. “I kind of liked it,” he says of the job, “but on the other side I thought, damn, I don’t want to do that the whole life. It’s not really challenging.”

Just as we start talking, a voice calls from the studio’s entrance. “Hey, how are you doing? I’m here from the fire department, just here for a quick inspection.” Krewer goes off to handle that, and I take the chance to poke around the studio. Three giant bears are standing on hind legs, seemingly prepared to climb out of one huge painting and attack. Vultures lurk behind a masked boy in another work, with a hyena off in the distance, watching it all. A figure is surfing atop a subway, a pursuit that has led to awful deaths and injuries in New York in recent years. The scenes are menacing, precarious, fraught.

Everything is in order with the FDNY, and Krewer explains that he recorded a video of people surfing a train nearby. (He tends to work from photos, which he turns into drawings, then paintings.) “I think it shows a little bit how the young generation is so on edge,” he says. “You have social media, so that’s like the big stage. If you post a video like that, that will definitely go viral.” He had his own dangerous moments in his youth. “As a kid in Germany, we jumped from garages, where cars were parked,” he says. “I was flying once and landed like Superman and broke my arm.” He was born in a small town in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate to a father working his way up in an insurance company and a mother who worked in retail.

At a moment of hyper-professionalization in the art world, Krewer’s path to becoming an in-demand artist feels refreshingly unusual. He departed the house painting job to study technical drawing at a Cologne architecture school. He painted for an assignment given by one professor, Nikolaus Bienefeld, who was impressed. Krewer loved the process and started painting every day in the basement of his family’s home. “My mom would come down,” he recalls, “and say, ‘You’re fucking up the whole cellar!’”

Bienefeld told Krewer he should apply to art school, which seemed ridiculous to him. His teacher also told him, as he recalls it, “Flo, you need to go to museums, you need to look up artists.” He did and was taken with the work of maverick contemporary figures like Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz. Their influence lingers in his work, alongside nods to giants like Francis Bacon and Titian, but Krewer remains unbeholden to art history.

In time, Krewer set his sights on the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, attracted by teachers like Peter Doig, who would end up being a key mentor, and Tal R, who “was making these incredible etchings and also drawings—super precise, you know?” he tells me. “I spent hours drawing because I thought: I need to put my effort in to show that I have more skills.”

An understated relentlessness characterizes Krewer’s approach. He operates without assistants, refusing to repeat himself, always bobbing and weaving. Shortly before one early show, he realized he had forgotten to ship his paintings from Germany to New York. Before flying back home to retrieve them, he partied into the morning before his flight, departing by bike. “I was quite excited, and I crashed full speed into a parked bike, smashed my whole face,” he says. “But I was still able to get to the plane.”

Krewer’s been settled in New York since 2020. “Germany, I don’t want to go back, to be honest,” he says. “It’s too close-minded in structure, and it feels so stuck in the box already. Here, much more, you can be yourself, and open yourself.”

One might place him in a noble tradition of German painters who have arrived on American shores and found themselves taking the measure of an adopted country—think of Max Beckmann or George Grosz. Like them, Krewer is an artist attuned to a dark time. There is a pervasive tension in many of his new works, but there are also people stealing moments of freedom. One new canvas was inspired by his visits to drag shows, which once were packed but now seem empty to him. “It feels like the city’s vibe is getting more conservative in certain areas,” he says, “and it feels also even more segregated than before, so it feels more isolated. I have this kind of new feeling that I tried to bring into my paintings.”