Jonas Roßmeißl

Streitbildhauerei

We are pleased to announce Jonas Roßmeißl’s second solo exhibition at Klemm’s as part of Gallery Weekend 2024. Streitbildhauerei also marks the first exhibition in the gallery’s future premises.

In his work Jonas Roßmeißl explores the opposing forces of the image economies that surround us and the associated politics and concepts of the public sphere, identity, and intimacy. He focuses particularly on the nature of images–the possibilities, conditions, and forms of their production, presentation, and communication. Roßmeißl consistently confronts these constellations in the simultaneous consideration of two distinct dimensions: a cultural-technical (re-)shaping and interpretation of these works as charged with social, political, and ideological meaning on the one hand, and their materiality in the sense of their technical structure, their ‘look’, and their aesthetic imprint over time on the other.

A profound visual critique thus forms the core of Roßmeißl’s practice: process-based, intervening, precise, and open-ended. The process does not, however, result in any ‘new images’, no new ‘content’, no directionless ‘iconoclasm’…Roßmeißl’s medium of expression is decidedly sculptural-objective in the broadest sense, haptic, and physically present in space.

Sometimes hermetically sealed, with a calculated fetishistic air, sometimes arranged as rather sprawling apparatuses, his sculptural ensembles and complex productions captivate viewers with their own unique alien-yet-familiar aesthetic. They manifest themselves as multi-layered, often confrontational experimental arrangements that never remain mere models but openly display their operative, ‘catalytic’ potential: conceptual stringency and imaginative power find their form in a credible material realism.

The acute presence that surrounds Roßmeißl’s works derives precisely from the palpable conflict between the use of traditional images and materials and the will to create an absolutely new form, an unbiased view of the future.

In Streitbildhauerei Jonas Roßmeißl approaches these overarching concepts through an analysis of the terms ‘emptying’ and ‘deletion’, ‘standardization’ and ‘precision’. In a composition tailored to the specific character of the exhibition spaces, Roßmeißl stages a dialog of sculptural objects and wall-bound and video works and explores the mechanisms of the systems of interaction between humans and machines.

In the process, he raises crucial questions in our technologically influenced socio-economic environment created under the assumption of ‘infallible precision’: What happens if the global systems of communication and financial interaction collapse? If the sedative of the stream of images breaks off and any sense of ‘safety’ erodes? Are continued insecurity and the ‘big wide-open’ really bearable conditions, or do they bring about the failure of the concept of civilization/civilized life as we know it?

In Streitbildhauerei, Jonas Roßmeißl intentionally does not offer a simple illustration of the diffuse ‘fear of the failure of society’, but rather enables us to think in terms of pictorial subjects that can capture the duality of ‘complexity’ and ‘triviality’ behind the most important social infrastructures and offer a different understanding of their form and functionality. The pieces openly expose their questions and doubts regarding the concepts of authority, ownership, systems of measurement, precision, and function, and bring them into a productive relationship in their final, amalgamated, sculptural form.

Roßmeißl’s “polemic sculpture”[1] thus develops its visual and material momentum from the condensation of the complex relationship between mechanical and electronic, imaginary and poetic forces. With the disruptive potential that he inscribes in his works, he also formulates a creative force: how can we bring the machine world, physicality, and humanity into play without supporting a technical rationality based on social or individual dominance?

Streitbildhauerei brings together a series of current and recent works that Jonas Roßmeißl has deliberately incorporated into the exhibition body and presented for discussion in the context of an ‘unfinished architecture’ – a space in the process of becoming. The works and the location are, as it were, snapshots of an ongoing creative process that interrupts its own development in order to accommodate the exhibition.

[1] Felix Trautmann, Polemic Sculpture: Infrapolitical Destructive Forces in Jonas Roßmeißl’s Sculptural Ensemble ‘a new static’, 2021