I would like to draw your special attention to this first solo exhibition of Georganne Deen (*1951) in Germany. Deen’s work is rooted in the American underground, pop and comic culture, as well as in the confrontation with her personal life story, as shared by many of the same generation: growing up in the 50s and 60s in the suburbs of the American West. In her paintings she finds allegories for this common past. She invents beautiful, evil, poetic and mean pictures for the “devils and gods” of the USA. In her blunt handling of her observations one recognizes her relationship with artists like R. Crumb or Pettibon. She herself says (after Byron Werner) that her work is: “anti-vague, anti-elite and entertaining”. Like all allegories, Deen’s are also subject to an iconographic system in which specific symbols appear again and again in the individual series, which become clearer from picture to picture. Her painting takes on the form of a somehow old-fashioned, anti-naturalistic genre, which she uses primarily because the allegorical form is so effective in telling stories with images, symbols and texts.

Georganne Deen (*1951, Fort Worth, Texas) lives and works in Los Angeles. She has exhibited extensively in the USA and Canada, as well as internationally, including the Power Plant, Toronto; Track 16, Los Angeles; The MAC, Dallas; San Diego Museum of Cont. Art; Boulder Museum of Cont. Art; Museum de Fortuny, Venice; Laguna Art Museum; La Foret Museum, Tokyo etc. Her works are represented in collections such as the Patchett Collection, the Collection Eileen and Peter Norton, among others. The exhibition at VAN HORN is her first solo exhibition in Germany.