NOw on view
jan zöller
14 September – 26 October 2024
The Exhibition is taking place in our new gallery location at Kantstraße 147
Robert Grunenberg is delighted to present the exhibition “Nothing else changes it just rearranges” by Jan Zöller.
JAN ZÖLLER
Nothing else changes it just rearranges
Robert Grunenberg
14.09.2024 – 26.10.2024
Robert Grunenberg is pleased to present ‘Nothing Else Changes It Just Rearranges’, the third solo exhibition by artist Jan Zöller (born 1992). It is also the inaugural exhibition of the new gallery space at Kantstr. 147 in Berlin-Charlottenburg, into which Zöller has also incorporated the windows and architecture of the former shop.
In content and form, Zöller’s painting instal-lation resembles a personal inventory. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a song by the American folk musician Edward Harold Hazlewood, whom Zöller admires. There is only one surviving YouTube video of him, spontaneously recorded by Harold’s childhood friend 13 years ago during a visit to Harold’s father’s dilapidated farm in Montana. Walking through the ruins of the house he grew up in, over endless grassy hills, Harold sings ‘Nothing Else Changes’ with immense pain, more like a question than a statement. The notoriously shy musician has deleted the video several times, but his friend keeps uploading it to keep the memory alive.
Zöller picks up on the fragile, outsider mood of the song in his painting – the raw, almost naked emotion, the idea of radical introspection, the idea of permanent change, which could also be a recombination of the always-same. His recent paintings, in which he works with charcoal, pastel chalk and highly diluted oil paint, have become more raw, more expressive and at the same time more vulnerable. The question of how to deal with personal and collective upheavals, with increasing insecurity, has permeated Zöller’s painting from the beginning. Increasingly, however, the focus is on the inner, everyday conditions that we experience individually or collectively. Ideas of fragmentation, reorganization and transformation, alternative forms of community and outsider societies play an important role in Zöller’s artistic practice.
Remove the outside to talk on the inside’ (2024) is the title of a large canvas in the exhibition. Indeed, his paintings and interventions resemble a painterly anatomy, with the painting becoming increasingly abstract and reduced. There is an elementary movement of uncovering, dismantling, tearing apart that seeks to advance towards an essence, a structure. In his most recent paintings, such as ‘Walking on footprints’, one literally looks through the various liquid or pasty layers of paint at expressive, skeletal structures, similar to a building site or X-ray images. To achieve this, Zöller draws with charcoal on an unprimed canvas treated with liquid acrylic paint, which he then overpaints with stain in various shades of brown and highly diluted oil paint and pastel chalk. As the stain is absorbed, the charcoal drawing is pushed forward again, while the oil paint is pushed behind the stain. The bird-like bodies are often indicated by geometric shapes, triangles, rectangles and circles, reminiscent of the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century, or a do-it-yourself avant-garde after a nuclear fallout. The process of painting creates different, superimposed layers that produce a paradoxical effect. The paintings appear extremely two-dimensional and at the same time suggest spatial depth through the layering.
Zöller reinforces this impression with pasty layers of extremely bright pastel chalk and oil paint that sit almost sculpturally on the canvas. In one painting of a huge, exhausted butterfly, he even glues coloured glass stones to the canvas to enhance the effect. And of course, these layers of colour are also reminiscent of the layers of image editing software.
Zöller transfers the contrast between extreme flatness and depth into space as an installation. The starting point for the architectural elements of the installation is a 3 x 6 metre canvas. 3 x 6 metre canvas.Zöller first paints it with diluted acrylic, then with charcoal, using reduced bodies and nervous, intertwined networks of lines, and then applies the charcoal abrasion with his hands. He then cuts up the canvas. He staples the rectangular fragments in various constellations to a module of MDF panels that blocks the entrance to the exhibition space like a hybrid of wall and bench, or to a free-standing wall in the centre of the exhibition space.
He assembles the pieces of canvas like geometric surfaces to create new patchwork images in which ‘close-ups’ and parts of ‘long shots’ come together to form an abstract montage, similar to a film. At the same time, he creates panel paintings such as ‘Loneliness has a purpose’ (2024), in which the pieces of canvas are sewn together and stretched on a stretcher frame. Here, Zöller leaves spaces between the fragments, which he paints yellow like colour fields or blue to evoke a river. These empty spaces can suggest pauses, as in a composition by John Cage, or perhaps mark an interruption or a break.
Zöller describes a disruptive, precarious world that teeters on the brink of the abyss, yet maintains an almost magical balance. He creates an intellectual and spiritual space to experiment with what one might do or feel in this situation. His paintings mark tipping points, resembling fragile moments that could tip one way or the other at any time. His paintings convey a sense of urgency without becoming sentimental. Painting titles such as ‘Every morning some meditate at a river’ could convey spiritual truth or be placeholders, ‘truisms’. But Zöller never becomes cynical like Kippenberger. He never retreats comfortably into folk- or outsider art His painting does not pretend to know more than the viewer: ‘Uncomfortable Rest’ is the title of one of his paintings. He leaves us in that state. But his painting stays with us, endures this uncertain time with us, hopes for community with us – and that is what makes it so powerful.
Jan Zöller, born in 1992 in Haslach im Kinzigtal, lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany. He studied Fine Arts at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe. Recently, Jan Zöller had a solo exhibition at Meyer Riegger in Karlsruhe. He has also exhibited at Kunstverein Heppenheim, Kunstverein Friedrichshafen, Städtische Galerie in Ostfildern, and Galería Ehrhardt Flórez in Madrid.
Opening
13 September 2024
6 – 9 PM
Exhibition on view
14.09.2024 – 26.10.2024
For more information, please contact the gallery: mail@robertgrunenberg.com
This exhibition is supported by
