Oska Gutheil, born Ravensburg, 1980, lives and works in Berlin.

The protagonists in Oska Gutheil’s paintings are his personal monsters. They appear in the form of creatures wearing scold’s bridles, hungry crocodile-dinosaur hybrids, cats, skinned bodies, sex-club denizens, worm-eaten chimeras that are half human, half animal, or hordes of affable phalluses. The spaces he composes often resemble surreal mobiles or towers in which these figures, many of them sexless, become Gutheil’s alter egos. His mastery of his medium is on display in paintings executed in vigorous brushwork and raised areas of oil paint that weave in far-flung references to the works of Picasso, Philip Guston, or Hieronymus Bosch. Beyond the political dimension of queer emancipation, Gutheil invites us to explore the world of a vivid puerile imagination, which he deftly contrasts with the arid earnestness of heteronormative lifestyles.