Jonas Roßmeißl
“I produce sculpture. Why? Why create the image of a different world, if the object realizes it? Sculpture operates in the entanglement of time, fractures the totality of perspective and embodies the agility of value. […] It enables me to negotiate the disruptive with respect to the reproductive, formulate a subject critique towards the objectification of violence and decompose perceptual orders.” Jonas Roßmeißl
“History, in these sculptures, becomes not just a monument to struggle but a part of the struggle itself. And in the re-covery, the re-articulation, of that process, they in turn orientate themselves towards an unwritten future – they become as much a vision of the future as they are a critique of the present, or subversion of the past.” Reuvane David Simmons, 2020
Jonas Roßmeißl is developing his work according to a critical-emphatic analysis of social conditions. He questions prevailing concepts of the public sphere, identity and intimacy as well as the associated possibilities, conditions and forms of their representation: What is the state of the utopia of collectivity and political spaces of action under repressive systems and the influence of technology and rationalised reproduction in the present? What is the situation regarding vulnerability and empathy? Is there still a will and potential to break out and change? What could this look like?
Jonas Roßmeißl approaches these comprehensive themes through intensive research and permeation of his subjects combined with the ability to make employed materials, technical know-how, and production processes literally his own. Roßmeißl creates sculptures and complex multi-part settings: sometimes hermetically contained, with a calculated fetishistic air, sometimes rather sprawling apparatuses of a dystopian future. Always appealing and appalling at the same time. Radically interdisciplinary and immensely precise, Roßmeißl’s work develops its own distinct aesthetics: historical motifs, information and material attributions of the collective (sub)consciousness are combined in his sculptures, preserved into another world – amalgamated with machines and technology.
At first glance, the works appear to be destructive in nature, modern ruins. But they quickly establish a different, more lasting impression: they manifest their idiosyncratic interpretation of a contemporary Luddism and radically open iconoclasm that already bears within it’s disruptive potential to reformulate its creative force.
Publications
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Arbeiten (works) 2016 – 2020
Artist book published as an award on the occasion of the study prize of the HGB-Freundeskreis and the Sparkasse Leipzig, 2019