Jonathan Meese -
Tim Van Laere Gallery_Yard
12 May–25 June 2011
Verlatstraat 23-25
2000 Antwerp – Belgium
T+32-3-257 14 17
F+32-3-257 14 25
www.timvanlaeregallery.com
Tim Van Laere Gallery presents Wir, Erzkinder lernen Macht (Süsses Dorf der Verdammtin) = Die Gören, 2007 by Jonathan Meese in the Tim Van Laere Gallery_Yard.
Jonathan Meese (Born in 1970 in Tokyo, lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg) is renowned for his multi-faceted work, including wildly exuberant paintings, installations, ecstatic performances and a powerful body of sculptures in a variety of media. All of Meese’s work flows from a philosophical position he has defined for this artistic pursuit, his sculpture is the way he gives permanence to his ideas. His bronze and ceramic figures essentially are surrogates for Meese and the various guises he assumes as well as for the forces of good and evil that he channels when he performs. He therefore sees himself as both the boy and the girl in his bronze in Wir, Erzkinder lernen Macht (Süsses Dorf der Verdammtin) = Die Gören, 2007. These grotesque figures also represent both Dr. No as a child and the demonic children in the 1960 science fiction film The Village of the Damned. But as Meese notes, the children in his work “are playing at being evil, but they could just as easily have assumed the guise of hero or king.” and “art is permanent child’s play.” In his works, Meese frequently references the James Bond villain, Dr. No. He has watched the film Dr. No repeatedly and finds its battle of good and evil cathartic. By referencing Dr. No and other villains both real and fictional in his work, Meese aims to exorcise evil from the world.
Since Tim Van Laere Gallery often focuses on sculpture in his program, regularly a monumental sculpture by an artist will be shown in the Tim Van Laere Gallery_Yard.
Text after Bonnie Clearwater, Jonathan Meese: Sculpture, Moca North Miami Catalog, Miami, 2010.
For more information, please contact the gallery.
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