Jennifer Franzke

is a contemporary American painter whose large watercolours focus on the intersection of humanity and wild life. Her beautifully detailed, often violent paintings depict a world where human figures rarely appear but their effect is always implied. 

Institutional exhibitions by Franzke include The Tatzelwurm, Kitzbühel Museum, Austria, 2019-2020 (with a special showing of the Tatzelwurm Taxidermy Lion in The Natural History Museum, Vienna); Love Actually, Deutsches National Jagd- und Fischereimuseum, Munich, Germany; and SchnappSCHUSS! (SnapSHOT!), Deutsches National Jagd- und Fischereimuseum, Munich, Germany.

Franzke's Tatzelwurm exhibition at the Kitzbühel Museum, Austria took place from 2019-2020. Her love of the Tirol, the Alps and it's wildlife is a source of inspiration for her work. Franzke took the Tatzelwurm, the mythological dragon of the Alps, from it's 17th century origins and brought it into the modern world. As wildlife and city boundaries are increasingly blurred, the Tatzelwurm also encroaches on the town of Kitzbühel and the surrounding ski region. The Natural History Museum in Vienna (special thanks to Dr. Ernst Mikschi, Robert Illek and Iris) created a life size Tatzelwurm to accompany the exhibit. The Tatzelwurm exhibit had the highest visitor numbers ever recorded for the Museum Kitzbühel.

Selected large scale watercolours (special thanks to Dara Mitchell, Former Director of American Art at Sotheby's for her mentoring of these works) from the Kitzbühel Museum and taxidermy project with the Naturally History Museum Vienna

Tatzelwurm

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Love Actually 

In Jennifer Franzke’s second solo exhibition at the German National Hunting and Fishing Museum deals again with wild animals and birds. This time the wild in ‘Wild-life’ is taken seriously: territorial fights, mating rituals and the fight for dominance are shown in the deadly competition for the right to mate. The scenarios are as varied as are the species: antlers crack against antlers, snarling razor sharp teeth try to sink into opposers fur, long necks swing with deadly force against each other.

Franzke presents the fight for mating rights and dominance on various stages, whose prototype Eadweard Muybridge invented 150 years ago. Muybridge was the first photographer to accurately capture the movement of animals in a series of single images. To do this he built a long wall that was numbered and gridded. Each number stood for a camera that made a photo as thin wires were broke by the galloping horse running by. As the work progressed, his stages and techniques developed. Not only horses, but wild animals, birds and people were analysed with these techniques.
Jennifer Franzke’s fascination with Muybridge is not the kinetic sequence but the physical stage, the graph on the wall, the numbered and marked points. She uses this artificial stage as a contrast for the animalistic fight for love. Franzke’s animal protagonists on stage are the essence of a romantic drama: She presents us with energetic scenes of species specific mating rituals and deadly serious duels for females and territory, peppered with human intervention. This can be a tent but also smaller in the form of bullet holes, arrows or tranquilizing darts or just a circus ring. Sometimes Franzke suggests the view that as in civilization, as in the animal world, life is not fair. With such components, her paintings on second view show a level of complexity and tension which is not typically found in the medium of watercolor and paper.
Besides the mating and territorial fights illustrated on the various Muybridge stages, or even on Franzke’s improvised billboard or drive-in Muybridge-like backgrounds, she also takes information from newspapers and press releases for her inspiration. When one has seen the only black flamingo in the world trying to win the dancing competition for love or the storm blown roseate spoonbill in New Jersey who found a companion in a common white egret the images are not easily forgotten.
Love actually – also animal love has many facets
Nicola Wacker

Selected watercolors (special thanks to Prof. Dr. Johanna Fassl and Dara Mitchell for their critique and support)

Love Actually

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Jennifer Franzke’s first solo exhibition at the German National Hunting and Fishing Museum,  „Schnappschuss“ which means Snap Shot, creates a radical new view of traditional hunting motives found in the past tradition of old Germanic and Keltic sniper targets. The architect and artist cheekily twists the classic dynamic of hunter and hunted by flipping the coin on the hunter (the voyeur) by making the voyeuer the object of „voyeuerism.“ She layers her paintings with paper collages of early photographic sequences from Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of animal and humans in motion to simultaneously declare a single moment, like a frame in an old Super-8 film, but still ask the viewer to imagine a before and after moment. 

Traditionally, „Schutzenscheiben“ are rooted in Keltic and early Germanic  „Vogelschuss“ or bird shooting. Society members would meet once a year to find and shoot a bird and honor the best marksman as the „Schützenkönig and then parade the bird in a festival. With the advance of Christianity, the live target was gradually replaced with an inanimate bird-like sculpture. By the end of the 30 Year War this developed into a wooden target. The targets became a popular form of folk art. They reflected the views and politics of the time. 

Jennifer Franzke’s paintings take the tradition of the Schützescheibe into the 21st Century. From afar, one sees innocent animals such as stags, deer, rams, hares, foxes and birds. As one looks closer at the paintings one sees crosshairs, reticules and targets - the animals are seen as prey by the viewers. But at the same time Franzke plays with polar opposites by flipping the classic hunter-prey relationship. The seemingly innocent animals look directly into the viewer/hunter’s eye. „Nature fascinates me“ declares the artist who herself is a passionate fisher, „but the subject and its representation shouldn’t be something to easy for me. Playing with contradiction gives my work a duality that involves the viewer in a multi-layered dimension.“ Animals are traditionally presented in „Schützenscheiben“ from the side, running away and helpless. In Franzke’s works they are aggressive and proud. 

Professor Doctor Johanna Fassl

Selected watercolors (Special thanks to Prof. Dr. Johanna Fassl for her encouragement and critique)

SchnappSCHUSS! SnapSHOT!

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