Horst Theissen

If every great Venetian artist could paint a superlative dog, hardly one of them could paint an adequate cat. Veronese once painted an excellent cat’s head, no more, Lorenzo Lotto has one fine black prowler in a background, and Jacopo Bassano, in the sixteenth century, caught a pair of country cats admirably among the multitudinous creatures of his ‘Animals Entering the Ark.’ Otherwise the cats are mostly hopeless. Lotto gives us a cat like a rat, Tintoretto a cat like a hyena, Giovanni Bellini a cat like a monkey, and Pietro Longhi a cat curled up under a table like a nightmare raccoon.

Perhaps the cat was too impatient a sitter, or seemed to the Venetian mind, so impressed by grandeur and fidelity, a little flibbertigibbet for art. It was certainly not unfamiliarity that inhibited the artists, or even lack of affection, for Venice has always been one of the great cat-cities of the world: before the Second World War there were said to be 40,000 cats in the city, one for every four humans, and there are still few places in Europe where the cat is more indulgently regarded, or more enviably free of spirit.

—Jan Morris, ‘A Venetian Bestiary’, 1982

Horst Theissen (b. 1979) lives and works in Cologne where he paints pedigree cats. This is his first solo gallery exhibition. His work has previously been exhibited at Zeitraumexit, Mannheim (2016), Museum Haus Cajeth, Heidelberg (2017) and with KAT18, Cologne (2016, 2018, 2019 and 2021).