CLICK ON LOGO
|
CLICK ON LOGO
|
CLICK ON LOGO
|
Marcus Jansen - AFTERMATH 2017
By Prof. Dr Elmar Zorn (Art Historian)
In September 2011, ten years after the 9/11 apocalypse in New York, on the occasion of a show of watercolors by the Chinese painter Paul Ching-Bor, who lives in New York, a panel discussion on the subject “Aftermath” was held in the White Box art gallery in Munich. Two of the authors of this book, Dieter Ronte and Manfred Schneckenburger, had been invited. Artists continue to be fascinated by post-apocalyptic scenarios and fantasies, most recently in view of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean or the Fukushima nuclear power plant catastrophe in March 2011. And fall 2016 saw the premiere of a Canadian TV series called Aftermath, about an ordinary family imperiled by the end of the world. Accordingly, our decision to use that same title for this book — referring to the predominant feature of Marcus Jansen’s artistic message — was simple enough. Significantly, “Aftermath of Awe” was the title of an excellent essay on Jansen’s work by the American art historian Brooke Lynn McGowan.
Hers was the main scholarly contribution to the publication Marcus Jansen: Decade, recently published by the well-respected Skira editore in Milan and New York as the most comprehensive discussion of Jansen’s work up to that time. It was followed by a rapid-fire sequence of additional publications and events. John Scoular’s documentary Marcus Jansen – Examine & Report provides insight into the world behind Jansen’s work. In the film we watch the creation of the painting Phase 1: With expansive bodily movement, Jansen instinctively applies black pigment onto a larger-than-life-size canvas ( 108 × 88 in. ) with a long-handled paintbrush. He then continues to rework the forms produced, using a sponge, his hands, and other painting utensils, pausing again and again to reflect. Finally, from one moment to the next, he calls the work finished. Jansen says of his working method: “I am much more interested in what I feel about a subject than what I see in a subject.”
His feelings are in large part determined by his military past, which threads its way through many of his motifs. Into these motifs he incorporates imagery drawn from things such as the New York street-art scene from the 1980s. In the manner of the Pop Art of Robert Rauschenberg and the graffiti art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jansen has developed his own signature. After the first screening of this documentary at the 2016 Fort Myers Film Festival, it was also shown as part of the Triennale di Milano in September 2016 on the occasion of an exhibition of Jansen’s work there. The Mannheim art journal ARTPROFIL published an extensive portrait of Jansen, with one of the main motifs from his oeuvre, The Faceless Professor, on the cover. A short time later, in early December 2016, the inauguration of Jansen’s enormous new atelier — also the headquarters of his production firm, UNIT A — was a major artistic and social event in Fort Myers. At the beginning of 2017, a three-part solo exhibition of Jansen’s works was mounted by the Düsseldorf Galerie Kellermann: in January in Düsseldorf’s Orrick-Haus in cooperation with the resident Sozietät Orrick, in the gallery itself in Düsseldorf-Oberkassel, and at Art Karlsruhe from February 16 to 19, 2017. Two days before that closing, on February 17, Jansen’s first German museum exhibition opened in the Kallmann-Museum Ismaning, near Munich, where his works served as the focal point in a group show titled Ecce Creatura. Also featured are the Parisian painter Gérard Stricher, who has an atelier in the Claude Monet village of Vétheuil ( Gérard Stricher: Peinture / Malerei / Painting, Munich 2016 ), the Belgian artist and psychologist Rita De Muynck ( Rita De Muynck: Under the Skin, Munich 2014 ), who lives in the “Blue Land” village of Schlehdorf, near the Franz Marc Museum in Kochel, and the Berlin painter Ruprecht von Kaufmann. The theme of this exhibition, paraphrasing the Ecce Homo motif in art history, is the image of the deformed and forsaken man exposed to extreme situations. The present volume builds upon the extraordinarily precise work of the publication Marcus Jansen: Decade ( Skira editore Milan 2015 / New York 2016 ) and refers to it programmatically — even following the same format. The introduction was provided by the art historian Dieter Ronte, well known in Germany and Austria ( he served as director of Vienna’s two museums for contemporary art for ten years and was most recently director of the Kunstmuseum Bonn ). In it he discusses the chief elements — abstraction and reality — in Jansen’s artistic approach.
The following essay by Manfred Schneckenburger, one of today’s major writers on art ( twice director of documenta in Kassel and longtime rector of Münster’s Kunstakademie ), presents a meticulous study of Jansen’s works in unprecedented detail, based on the reproductions in Decade. This served as a guideline in our selection of paintings for the first section of plates in the book, which is followed by unpublished works on paper. Unlike the selection made by the Galerie Kellermann for the exhibitions in Düsseldorf and Karlsruhe, which presented objects and installations in addition to paintings, we have limited ourselves to works on canvas and paper. The last of the book’s texts is the essay “Improvisation as Creative Principle” by Gottfried Knapp. In his recondite contribution, Knapp, the leading art and architecture critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, discusses the contrary art principles of abstraction and representation in such a way that Jansen himself has confirmed with amazement that what impels him as an artist has never before been so precisely identified. The first part of Marcus Jansen’s tour of European museums and galleries ends with a presentation that has the same title as the book. Aftermath will be shown at two nearby art sites: in the gallery spaces of the art association Kunst und Kultur zu Hohenaschau e.V. from March 17 to April 23 and in the Kunstraum Klosterkirche of the ARTS Kulturfördervereinigung in Traunstein on March 18 and 19. The aim of these six events is to provide a matrix for the subsequent exhibitions which will be held in German and Austrian museums and galleries until the end of 2018. Embedded in this tour are the shows planned for 2018 in New York and at the Baker Museum Artis – Naples in Florida. Finally, at the end of this major undertaking there is to be a documentary volume with statements by museum directors and gallerists involved with the tour, as well as photos by the Munich photographer and teacher Max Ott, who has been documenting the entire cycle since the atelier opening in late 2016 and will continue to do so. This book could not have been produced without the generous support of the businessman and art collector Mark Gyetvay, to whom we express our most profound gratitude. We also owe special thanks to Dieter and Erika Rampl, art lovers at home in Florida and Munich, who were the first to point out to the German and Austrian art world the extraordinary quality of Marcus Jansen’s art. And just as Neo Rauch set out from Germany on his conquest of America years ago, with this exhibition tour and the present volume the American Marcus Jansen — not unlike Rauch in his painterly and narrative approaches — is taking on the German-speaking world.
By Prof. Dr Elmar Zorn (Art Historian)
In September 2011, ten years after the 9/11 apocalypse in New York, on the occasion of a show of watercolors by the Chinese painter Paul Ching-Bor, who lives in New York, a panel discussion on the subject “Aftermath” was held in the White Box art gallery in Munich. Two of the authors of this book, Dieter Ronte and Manfred Schneckenburger, had been invited. Artists continue to be fascinated by post-apocalyptic scenarios and fantasies, most recently in view of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean or the Fukushima nuclear power plant catastrophe in March 2011. And fall 2016 saw the premiere of a Canadian TV series called Aftermath, about an ordinary family imperiled by the end of the world. Accordingly, our decision to use that same title for this book — referring to the predominant feature of Marcus Jansen’s artistic message — was simple enough. Significantly, “Aftermath of Awe” was the title of an excellent essay on Jansen’s work by the American art historian Brooke Lynn McGowan.
Hers was the main scholarly contribution to the publication Marcus Jansen: Decade, recently published by the well-respected Skira editore in Milan and New York as the most comprehensive discussion of Jansen’s work up to that time. It was followed by a rapid-fire sequence of additional publications and events. John Scoular’s documentary Marcus Jansen – Examine & Report provides insight into the world behind Jansen’s work. In the film we watch the creation of the painting Phase 1: With expansive bodily movement, Jansen instinctively applies black pigment onto a larger-than-life-size canvas ( 108 × 88 in. ) with a long-handled paintbrush. He then continues to rework the forms produced, using a sponge, his hands, and other painting utensils, pausing again and again to reflect. Finally, from one moment to the next, he calls the work finished. Jansen says of his working method: “I am much more interested in what I feel about a subject than what I see in a subject.”
His feelings are in large part determined by his military past, which threads its way through many of his motifs. Into these motifs he incorporates imagery drawn from things such as the New York street-art scene from the 1980s. In the manner of the Pop Art of Robert Rauschenberg and the graffiti art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jansen has developed his own signature. After the first screening of this documentary at the 2016 Fort Myers Film Festival, it was also shown as part of the Triennale di Milano in September 2016 on the occasion of an exhibition of Jansen’s work there. The Mannheim art journal ARTPROFIL published an extensive portrait of Jansen, with one of the main motifs from his oeuvre, The Faceless Professor, on the cover. A short time later, in early December 2016, the inauguration of Jansen’s enormous new atelier — also the headquarters of his production firm, UNIT A — was a major artistic and social event in Fort Myers. At the beginning of 2017, a three-part solo exhibition of Jansen’s works was mounted by the Düsseldorf Galerie Kellermann: in January in Düsseldorf’s Orrick-Haus in cooperation with the resident Sozietät Orrick, in the gallery itself in Düsseldorf-Oberkassel, and at Art Karlsruhe from February 16 to 19, 2017. Two days before that closing, on February 17, Jansen’s first German museum exhibition opened in the Kallmann-Museum Ismaning, near Munich, where his works served as the focal point in a group show titled Ecce Creatura. Also featured are the Parisian painter Gérard Stricher, who has an atelier in the Claude Monet village of Vétheuil ( Gérard Stricher: Peinture / Malerei / Painting, Munich 2016 ), the Belgian artist and psychologist Rita De Muynck ( Rita De Muynck: Under the Skin, Munich 2014 ), who lives in the “Blue Land” village of Schlehdorf, near the Franz Marc Museum in Kochel, and the Berlin painter Ruprecht von Kaufmann. The theme of this exhibition, paraphrasing the Ecce Homo motif in art history, is the image of the deformed and forsaken man exposed to extreme situations. The present volume builds upon the extraordinarily precise work of the publication Marcus Jansen: Decade ( Skira editore Milan 2015 / New York 2016 ) and refers to it programmatically — even following the same format. The introduction was provided by the art historian Dieter Ronte, well known in Germany and Austria ( he served as director of Vienna’s two museums for contemporary art for ten years and was most recently director of the Kunstmuseum Bonn ). In it he discusses the chief elements — abstraction and reality — in Jansen’s artistic approach.
The following essay by Manfred Schneckenburger, one of today’s major writers on art ( twice director of documenta in Kassel and longtime rector of Münster’s Kunstakademie ), presents a meticulous study of Jansen’s works in unprecedented detail, based on the reproductions in Decade. This served as a guideline in our selection of paintings for the first section of plates in the book, which is followed by unpublished works on paper. Unlike the selection made by the Galerie Kellermann for the exhibitions in Düsseldorf and Karlsruhe, which presented objects and installations in addition to paintings, we have limited ourselves to works on canvas and paper. The last of the book’s texts is the essay “Improvisation as Creative Principle” by Gottfried Knapp. In his recondite contribution, Knapp, the leading art and architecture critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, discusses the contrary art principles of abstraction and representation in such a way that Jansen himself has confirmed with amazement that what impels him as an artist has never before been so precisely identified. The first part of Marcus Jansen’s tour of European museums and galleries ends with a presentation that has the same title as the book. Aftermath will be shown at two nearby art sites: in the gallery spaces of the art association Kunst und Kultur zu Hohenaschau e.V. from March 17 to April 23 and in the Kunstraum Klosterkirche of the ARTS Kulturfördervereinigung in Traunstein on March 18 and 19. The aim of these six events is to provide a matrix for the subsequent exhibitions which will be held in German and Austrian museums and galleries until the end of 2018. Embedded in this tour are the shows planned for 2018 in New York and at the Baker Museum Artis – Naples in Florida. Finally, at the end of this major undertaking there is to be a documentary volume with statements by museum directors and gallerists involved with the tour, as well as photos by the Munich photographer and teacher Max Ott, who has been documenting the entire cycle since the atelier opening in late 2016 and will continue to do so. This book could not have been produced without the generous support of the businessman and art collector Mark Gyetvay, to whom we express our most profound gratitude. We also owe special thanks to Dieter and Erika Rampl, art lovers at home in Florida and Munich, who were the first to point out to the German and Austrian art world the extraordinary quality of Marcus Jansen’s art. And just as Neo Rauch set out from Germany on his conquest of America years ago, with this exhibition tour and the present volume the American Marcus Jansen — not unlike Rauch in his painterly and narrative approaches — is taking on the German-speaking world.