Lukas Pusch, Berliner Weiße mit Schuss (Berlin White with a Shot). Image courtesy of the artist.

With his new series of wryly satirical and inventive woodcuts, Lukas Pusch takes an old fashioned medium and turns it on its head. Pusch toys with the limits of metaphorical language–turning common German expressions and puns into ruthlessly satirical images. The result is explosive. Berliner Weiße mit Schuss (Berlin White with a Shot), the title refering to typical German drink, shows a female corpse with a revolver slouched against a wall, the Berlin skyline rises behind her. For And Ostöffnung (Open East), he presents an inflatable rubber doll–always ready, always willing. Horror carved in wood. Playing on innocuous figures of speech, Pusch lures us in. But these works are not merely pictorial onliners. He uses the easily recognizable style of old propaganda posters, showing us how catchphrases, so apparently benign as to be ignored, can betray unseen poisons.

In Pusch’s painting Duchamps vs. Beckmann, we see a woman pissing not in Duchamp’s urinal but on the painter’s leg; the painter, drops his pants under the blissful smile of Nietzsche’s moustache. It is a lonely and agnonizing image–the painter left with a stinking mess of debated icons, and debased forms. Pusch paints his dilemma, our dilemma: the knowledge of the other side of the story. And Pusch’s answer–a humorous, if cruel, synthesis of oppositions–may be our last chance at redemption.