Jonathan Meese. Dr.Cyclops

Jonathan Meese, born in Tokyo in 1970, studied at the Hamburg Art Academy with professor Franz Erhald Walter. His first works came out in the international contemporary art scene at the Berlin Biennial in 1998, where, with Meese, John Boch and Christian Jankowsky (the three were in the same class at the Hamburg Academy) this new tendency of the “newactionists” or, as Harald Szeemann calls them “confusionists”, takes form. Meese's whole performances project is like a big recycling plant for social exorcisms, figuring out what can still be helpful at stirring up false certainties of what power and desire really mean, and what merely repeats false certainties. Meese's installations look like a bohemian squatter's lumber room, with labyrinths of narrow passages, staircases leading down to the original ground level, and arcades built into the space beneath these passages. The artist re-creates his little big worlds of troubling great details, photos, seventies poster, objects, writings. Not only gestures and clothes, but also the biological factor of facial features seems significantly culturally formed, by beer and order, class and stupidity, anxiety and depression. His casual presence in the installation mutated into more and more massively body-centred performance : “I exhume to consume, my body is the reactor in a huge rubbish-recycling-experiment of leaden world and intoxicated images”. After the Berlin Biennial, Meese had shows at P.S.1. in New York, at Sant Gallen Kunsthalle, at Wolksburg Museum in Wolksburg and now at Münchengladbach Museum.

The exhibition at Paolo Curti & Co. Gallery is referred to a movie of 1940 titled “Dr. Cyclops”, directed by Ernest Beumont Shoedsack, who was the director of the famous “King Kong” in 1930. The show will include paintings, installations, drawings, photos, sculptures and lightboxes.

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Jonathan Meese. Dr.Cyclops