Alexej Meschtschanow
Jacksonkill

Jun 24, 2021 – Aug 28, 2021
  • Jacksonkill, 2021, Klemm’s, Berlin

  • Jacksonkill, 2021, Klemm’s, Berlin

  • Jacksonkill, 2021, Klemm’s, Berlin

  • Jacksonkill, 2021, Klemm’s, Berlin

  • Jacksonkill, 2021, Klemm’s, Berlin

Klemm’s is pleased to present Jacksonkill, a solo exhibition by Alexej Meschtschanow.

Alexej Meschtschanow examines the physical and aesthetic qualities of established social conventions through sculpture and installation. With his works, Meschtschanow develops a completely independent aesthetic language, that combines the historical echoes of the ready-made with an idiosyncratic, abstract form-finding. In this way, the works assert themselves as autonomous creations, without losing their necessary social connection.

Meschtschanow’s artistic perspective focuses on the imaginative potential and psychological depths involved in the construction of identities, the compulsion toward self-realisation and the socially driven urge for optimisation. His sculptural works interlock two communicative modes – the passive and the active – thus exploring the dichotomy of aggression and protection deeply rooted in the contributory negligence of our society.

“The media promote an enormous pressure to succeed. The pressure is intolerable for many. ‘Burnout Syndrome’ is a buzzword which appears ever more frequently. Life goals are chosen by consumers, thoughtlessly, from an assortment that the mass media advertise. Requirements are tough but not always authentic. With motivations only available on loan, one doesn’t get very far. The clogged skid mark between earth and heaven is densely populated terrain by now. The stratum of mental casualties with their specific needs is growing and gaining a class consciousness. Society is mutating into a repair shop, overextended by the realization that it is in fact the original architectural drawings that are causing the ruin.” (A. Meschtschanow)

For his solo exhibition in the gallery, Meschtschanow condenses familiar artistic habits with a new visual vocabulary, for the first time involving color image-material, sourced from the high and the low of the ubiquitious visual noise.

New wall pieces, fractured in their individuality, coexist with the presence of peculiar sculptural beings, resulting in a cryptic dialogue of broken surfaces and frozen emotions.
Matter and images gather the ashes of an ongoing history, blurred by the illusory filters of a digital present – the overloaded contemporary archive serves here as background to the unresolved conflicts between serial existence and strive for uniqueness.

Meschtschanow’s artworks become charged with various contradictory qualities: the steel tubings, forced by the artist into potentially proliferative biological forms, play with the ambivalence of being both support and constraint – acting as auratic prothesis of reproducible entities.

“My mechanical mountings of photographical representations of social elements are not of a malicious nature, but rather conceived primarily as a means of ennoblement. The applied mounts are fitted to the found object in the most tender way. Certainly, the objects must suffer from the additional burden imposed on them, but in the end it is my iron appendages that will wrest them from the ravages of time. Furthermore, they do not appear in their original, faceless shape, but rather in a subjectified form in which their identities are stabilized and confirmed.” (A. Meschtschanow)

In Meschtschanow’s new works, the mechanical extensions seem to now bend in front of the disarming charm of contemporary enigmas, hence shrinking their material essence in order to expand the truth behind visual meaning. As a result, the physical and metaphorical pressure that culminates in the fetishist forms of modern representations reveals itself.

Jacksonkill is a meeting point between objects and images, self-research, self-awareness and self-conquest … a shattered present that lives through fractures and investigations in the complexities of unquestioned visuality.