House Tour #10, November 2024

Art viewing

David Gunderlach’s Casino – Expressive Mixed-Media Art at Haus Kunst Mitte

For the tenth edition of our HOUSE TOURS series, we are pleased to spotlight the artist David Gunderlach. His 1987 work Casino offers a compelling insight into his expressive and multilayered visual language. Created in New York, this powerful mixed-media piece blends painting with sculptural elements to explore key themes such as gambling, chaos, and consumerism in a bold artistic form.

David Gunderlach, Casino, 1987, Mixed media

Casino is realized in a mixed-media style, combining painted surfaces with three-dimensional objects in a cohesive composition shaped by Gunderlach’s signature foil technique. This method allows for the superimposition of multiple visual layers, which are either connected or separated through sculptural elements. These layered materials created a strong sense of visual depth in the exhibition, immediately captivating the audience.

The painting’s vibrant and striking color palette is dominated by orange, enhanced by bold tones of yellow, purple, turquoise, and more. Gunderlach’s dynamic, gestural brushwork and overlapping color fields generate an atmosphere of constant motion and latent unrest. Forms are often abstracted, and words appear scattered across the surface in an almost random fashion. This openness invites emotional resonance and leaves space for individual interpretation. The wavelike frame, adorned with blue and purple brushstrokes, merges the artwork with its surrounding space and amplifies its overall energy.

On a symbolic level, Casino is filled with objects and visual references. In the lower-left corner, a green playing field marked with the word “Passe” clearly evokes gambling. This reference—along with embedded coins, chips, and counters—creates a direct connection to the title Casino, conjuring images of a roulette table. A compass in the upper half of the painting draws attention to themes of orientation—or disorientation. The fragmented lettering “CAS” along the bottom edge reinforces the work’s title and provides another semantic anchor. Drawings of faces and figures introduce emotional tension and psychological fragmentation into the composition.

A standout element in the exhibition was a bright red toy gun—a three-dimensional object that starkly contrasts with the painterly background. Its sharp contours and intense color lend the piece a dramatic edge. This gun may symbolize danger, violence, or risk, serving as a pointed commentary on the hazards of gambling. Small dinosaur figurines, while humorous at first glance, can also allude to transience, extinction, or childlike naivety, depending on the viewer’s perspective. The surrounding purple and white brushstrokes integrate these figures into the painting’s overall flow. Phrases like “IRRE” (German for “crazy”) emphasize the expressive, chaotic nature of the work and evoke themes of irrationality and madness.