EHINGER TAGBLATT
Saturday, 20 September 2025
‘Poohtin’ next to the bowl
Exhibition At the Municipal Gallery, British artist Paul Critchley presents opulent interiors that make you wonder what is painted and what is real. By Christina Kirsch
Please allow plenty of time. The desire to look at Paul Critchley's paintings comes all by itself. At the Municipal Gallery, the British-born artist unfolds an opulent panorama of views and vistas over two floors, which immediately captivate the viewer with their attention to detail. The new exhibition does not feature paintings in the usual square or rectangular formats, but rather the outlines of chests of drawers, refrigerators, chairs, lamps – or a dog lifting its leg in a corner.
It is also advisable to look up. There, suddenly, are ventilation shafts and surveillance cameras. Not everything can be explained. For example, a few fish are swimming in water in the wooden drawers of a chest of drawers. They seem quite alive, but the situation is surreal.
Paul Critchley, who comes from a family of artists, paints interior and exterior spaces. Landscapes and furniture. On a shelf are plaster models that were used as templates for drawing studies at the academy. ‘They come from my parents' house,’ says the artist. Reality and fiction are mixed in the exhibition. Much of it comes from the house in Italy where he lives with his wife, Critchley explains. But there are also glimpses into somewhat dilapidated student digs, behind shower curtains and into refrigerators. A sheep's head stares at the viewer from the refrigerator. In the compartment below are preserved sheep's eyes. It’s good that this refrigerator can also be closed.
From the inside out
Paul Critchley's trademarks are classic diptychs or triptychs, similar to winged altars in churches. Shutters can be closed and doors opened. Sometimes you look into the distance, sometimes directly into a living room where a naked woman is lounging on the sofa. A painted radiant heater hangs on the wall in the bathroom. With a dangling string at the bottom to turn it on.
The layout of the Municipal Gallery, with its multiple rooms, lent itself to a kind of tour from the outside in. Visitors begin in the hallway with a view through a window from the outside and can then continue the tour in the next room, from the living room through the kitchen and into the bathroom. Details await everywhere. The brand name on the old-fashioned refrigerator door is not ‘Bosch’ but ‘Critchley’. Even a toilet bowl that urgently needs a toilet cleaner bears the artist's name as the company name.
Self-explanatory
The toilet paper is printed with ‘Poohtin’. The slang expression ‘Pooh’ is self-explanatory. In Russia, this image would probably have resulted in a prison camp sentence. Critchley stages unappetising things in a wonderfully amusing way. Even the remains of a fish dinner seem to be stinking away. Such meal still lifes with gnawed bones and fish heads set aside are particularly difficult to paint, explains the artist. If you ask for details and want to know why the fire extinguisher is on fire, the painter replies, ‘because I like it.’ The flames are, of course, only painted, but the pull-down with the safety ring is real. As real as the telephone cable connecting two painted telephones. Critchley's paintings are only amusing and harmless at first glance.
The work ‘The Time Of Remorse’ was created during Covid. The interior of the house is kept in a sombre grey, while outside it is green like the Garden of Eden. In this painting, the artist goes back to Adam and Eve. Here, expulsion from paradise is caused by a virus. In another painting, Homo sapiens is the most terrible virus on the planet. ‘We are taking up more and more space,’ says Critchley, who has not lost his British sense of humour amid climate catastrophy and warlords.
EHINGER TAGBLATT
„Poohtin“ neben der Schüssel
