Artist Talk with Daniel Richter, Jonathan Meese & Michał Jankowski. The discussion will be moderated by Michał Markiewicz.
The Artist Talk will be accompanied by a solo guitar improvisation and DJ set by Hubert Kostkiewicz.
Jonathan Meese (born 1970) is one of the world’s best-known contemporary German artists. He graduated from the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule für Bildende Künste im Hamburg). His ambiguous anarchic statements encompassing performance, installation, video art, sculpture, painting, theater set designs, directing balance between provocation and blasphemy, catharsis and exorcism always in spite of systemically ossified conventions. He has easily developed his own unique idiom in each genre he works with, seeing them as metabolically linked to each other. Meese’s work stems from the German traditions of Dada and Fluxus and Neo-Expressionism, drawing inspiration from artists such as Joseph Beuys and Martin Kippenberger. His Trickster practice includes, among other things, an interpretation of Wagnerian opera in which the artist uses sculpturally designed props and scenery, video projections and text fragments. Meese is also a theater director – his latest production is Die MonoSau (Volksbühne, Berlin), based on his own libretto. He has also frequently contributed to music collages. In cooperation with DJ Hell, he created the album Messe x Hell, on which he performed as a vocalist. In the course of his career, he has collaborated with many important artists such as Daniel Richter, Tal R, Albert Oehlen, Jörg Immendorf. Jonathan Meese’s works can be found, among others, in the collections of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Städel in Frankfurt, the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach, the Collection of Contemporary Art of the Federal Republic of Germany and in the collections of private collectors such as Harald Falckenberg and Charles Saatchi.
Michał Jankowski (born 1977) – visual artist, one of the most characteristic painters of the middle generation in Poland. Graduate of the Faculty of Art at the University of Zielona Góra (Leszek Knaflewski’s painting studio). His practice reveals a metaphorical game of destruction, which runs its natural course. His realizations are a narrative rebus, an intricate story. His early monochrome works had the character of an underground emblem with an existential dimension. Jankowski reaches out in an original way to the darker sides of European culture, those under the sign of the disturbing and fascinating, full of multithreaded meanings. He refers to and redefines the traditions of the avant-garde and surrealism. It immerses us in the faces of the demons that live (or once lived) in ourselves, in the world today and in human history. He encourages us to rewrite our relationship with things and the practice of processing them. His paintings are created through full use of the painterly medium: precise in every detail, thoughtful with every brushstroke. Although Jankowski uses figurative forms, he always leaves an element of mysterious understatement, in which irony and pessimism intermingle. Noteworthy, his experience includes a one-off participation as the vocalist of a fictional black metal band from the nineteen-nineties, Black Square (2011), heard in a video of the band created as an artistic project by Rafał Wilk and Sławomir “Zbiok” Czajkowski. Michał Jankowski’s works are held, among others, in the collections of the National Museum in Gdańsk/Department of Modern Art, SØR Rusche Sammlung, Muzeum Ziemi Lubuskiej, and by private collectors.
Daniel Richter (b. 1962) is one of the foremost German artists of his generation. He first came to prominence in the 1990s when he transitioned into fine art from the world of music, where he began his career designing posters and record sleeves for bands. Richter’s practice has evolved over time to encompass notable stylistic turns. His paintings synthesize art history, mass media, politics, sex, and contemporary culture into ever-changing pictorial worlds. The artist maintains that the dichotomy between abstract and figurative painting is a constructed fiction, since the formal problems of color and composition remain constant. This framework for thinking about painting continues to inform the development of Richter’s approach.
Hubert Kostkiewicz – associated with The Kurws, member of the post-punk band Atol Atol Atol. He has played several hundred concerts. He works in the field of electroacoustic and improvised music. Musician, producer, cultural animator and journalist.
More about the exhibition Freedom to Freedom can be found here.
