Alice Walker
Jennifer Franzke is an artist, architect and an associate scientist at the Natural History Museum Vienna. Her large scale watercolours take on 'the theme of an encroaching nature that has at once a celebratory and an apocalyptic feel to it. Jennifer‘s animals are beings out of place, not just in contact with civilization but in possession of it. They are symbolic of species adaptation and co-dependent survival, not a celebration of nature in the abstract or transcendental, but of its concrete, immanent presence.’ (Prof. Dr. Peter Sahlins)
If before it was man's ignorance or man's desire to explain natural phenomena through the creation of myths and mythical figures perhaps in the future the reason for the creation of such encounters and stories of mythical creatures will be for actual occurrences which are taking place now. Species that have fallen victim to human-induced biodiversity loss and climate change are real. Inexplicable phenomena and creatures with an aura of mystery will perhaps be replaced by sensational sightings of already extinct species (see Tasmanian tiger or great auk). Maybe they are the mythical creatures of tomorrow… (Dr. Bettina Riedel, Natural History Museum, Vienna)
‘Memento Mori’
Agate Room, Catherine Palace, Saint Petersburg, Russia, 2024
Watercolour on Arches Cotton 640 g/m2 119 x 102 cm (135 x 118 cm framed)
The Agate Room in Catherine Palace, Saint Petersburg was built in 1787. A caribou, snow leopard and a family of jackals find midwinter solace in one of the most exquisitely elegant interiors of 18th century Europe. I placed my favourite painters in the upper dome. Piranesi, Canaletto, Châtelet and Rubens are sandwiched between peregrine falcons and a snow rabbit. The Ariadne sculpture from Prince Eugene’s Belvedere is accented by the red jasper background. Sir Thomas Browne’s wandering skull (a victim of the early 19th century lust for skulls of the famous) is painted atop books with names of zoologists and historians that have guided me while painting ‘Memento Mori.’ The lower foreground has royal elements: a falconer’s glove and hood with my signature, a jewel box, exotic Fuji magpies and an ermine from the imagination of another great queen’s portrait painter, Hilliard’s Queen Elizabeth’s ‘Ermine Portrait.’
BELVEDERE
Belvedere Pavilion, Versailles, France, 2023, Watercolour on Arches Cotton 640 g/m2 152 x 102 cm (164 x 118 cm framed)
The Belvedere Pavilion at Versailles was built for Marie-Antoinette by Richard Mique in 1781. The octagonal building was as a music room. Two cheetahs are also listening for something in the pavilion. Is it the small monkey eternally circling the upper cornice? Or do they smell Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s blackbuck on the threshold of the room? The golden hanging light has a trio of animals. 2 macaws, perhaps escaped from Mdm. Du Barry, watch a gibbon foolishly reach for an imaginary moon or sun depicted in the intricate inlayed floor. A piebald peacock accentuates a sly fox that eyes eggs in a nest at the protective clawed foot of the foremost cheetah. Nature inspired by Frans Snyders provides a contrast to the filigran neoclassical interior.
Hotel de Lauzun, France, 2023
Watercolour on Arches Cotton 640 g/m2 149 x 102 cm (161 x 114 cm framed)
The Hôtel de Lauzun, built by Louis Le Val (also the architect from Versailles) between 1650 and 1658. The Hôtel is opened to the Seine view painted circa 30 times by Pissarro from his window. The main oval painting above the door is replaced by a Vanitas in the style of Pieter Claesz but with a monkey. On the fireplace mantel a golden pheasant sits atop books with the names of people that have helped me research historical and zoological elements of this painting. The lower left corner of the painting shows Systema Naturae from Linné which was the starting point for modern zoological order. Above it sits an ivory and gold Goblin Goblet, a remnant from the former orders of the ‘Kunstkammer’.
Large-scale watercolours depict ornate and luxurious interiors inhabited by beautiful creatures. Rather than disrupting or undercutting the elegance of the spaces, the natural world is an addition and the animals and interiors interact on a similar plane of existence. References to European royal menageries of the 16th to 18th centuries and the shift of the Kunstkammern to a modern understanding of zoology give depth and resonance to these magnificent paintings. A solo exhibition of Jennifer's new works, titled EDEN is currently in one of Germany's most beautiful baroque spaces, the German Hunting Museum which is in the Augustiner Church in Munich. The exhibition also includes smaller works she drew from the collections of the Natural History Museum in Vienna.
Special thanks to:
Dara Mitchell, former Sotheby's director of American Art
Dr. Ernst Mikschi, Director of Zoology, Natural History Museum Vienna
Dr. Frank Zachos, Dr. Bettina Riedel and team at the Natural History Museum Vienna
Dr. Georg Lechner, Baroque curator, Belvedere, Vienna
Prof. Dr. Peter Sahlins, Berkeley and Paris, for his text and writings
Tatzelwurm, 2019
Franzke's Tatzelwurm exhibition at the Kitzbühel Museum, Austria took place from 2019-2020 and due to it's popularity is now at the Deutsches National Hunting Museum from March till October 15, 2023. Franzke took the Tatzelwurm, the mythological dragon of the Alps, from its 17th century origins and evolved it into the modern world. As wildlife and city boundaries are increasingly blurred, the Tatzelwurm accordingly encroaches on the town of Kitzbühel and the surrounding ski region. In Kitzbühel she worked with the Naturschutzbund Österreich and in Munich with the Bayerischen Ministeriums für Ernährung, Landwirtschaft und Forsten to provide a platform and bring awareness to the plight of the smaller sibling of the Tatzelwurm, the European wildcat (Felis silvestris). 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 from the Kitzbühel Museum
Special thanks to:
Dara Mitchell, Former Director of American Art at Sotheby's for her mentoring of these works
Dr. Ernst Mikschi for his evolutionary insights and taxidermy idea
Dr. Wido Sieberer, Nicola Wacker and Jennifer Schmaus for text, historical objects and curation
Matthias Gangkofner for his skeleton of a Tatzelwurm and artistic influence
Love Actually, 2018
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:
Nicola WackerProf. Dr. Johanna Fassl
Dara Mitchell
Jennifer Schmaus
SCHNAPPSCHUSS, 2016
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.
Her 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)
Selected Exhibitions
German National Hunting and Fishing Museum, Munich, The Coolest Cat in Town, The Tatzelwurm March-October, 2023
Kitzbühel Stadtmuseum, Kitzbühel, Austria. Solo paintings and idea for the Tatzelwurm, with Natural History Museum Vienna. Fall Winter 2019-2020
German National Hunting Museum, Munich, Solo Exhibition, Love Actually, May 16, 2018 to Febuary 1, 2019
Hirmer, Munich, Solo exhibit, Caneletto’s Sketchbook October-November 2016
Group Exhibit in the Reismühle, Munich July, 2016
German National Hunting Museum, Munich, Solo Exhibition,SchnappSCHUSS!, March-November, 2016
Group Exhibit in the Reismühle, Munich July, 2015
S-Galerie in Kreissparkasse, Starnberg, 2006
Solo-BASF Headquarters, 2005
Solo-Porsche Zentrum Munich, 2005
Solo-Antica Trattoria, Grünwald, 2004
Image, Starnberg, 1995
Thymian, Munich, 1994
Form im Raum, Munich, 1993
Piano Nobile, Coral Gables, 1992
The Century Hotel, Miami Beach, 1992
Silverline Gallery, Portobello Rd, London, 1990
and numerous other group exhibitions
Education
Honors at University of Miami, Architecture Major and Fine Arts Minor
Architectural Association Diploma Architecture and RIBA qualifications
Tutors: Ron Arad, Nigel Coates, Tony Swannell
Awards and Honors
Best Office of the Year, Wirtschaftswoche, Winner for Universal Studios, Munich
University of Miami Designer of the Year, 1984 - 1985
University of Miami Honor Role
Various Academic and Sport (Track and Cross Country) Scholarships
High School Honor Roll, Cape Coral High School, Fl.
Executive Internship Program for Gifted Students, 1983-1984
