Jan Groover

The 30x40s

Klemm’s is pleased to announce American artist Jan Groover‘s (1943–2012) second solo exhibition with  the gallery, featuring exceptional prints from the late 1980s and early 1990s, previously unseen in Germany. In these later works – rare chromogenic color prints in the format 30×40 inches –, color dominates, perspective becomes vague, spatial ambiguity is crafted, and light transforms into an object of its own. Jan Groover was interested in photographic images that seemed precisely planned and made, rather than discovered and captured by the camera. The photographs not only convey this impression– Groover‘s images were created on location, in the literal arrangement of her pictorial compositions, not in post-production.

The framework in which the 30×40 still lifes are arranged is reminiscent of mystical theater scenes, dramatic moments and, above all, painted nature morte.
Enriched and at the same time counter-checked with mostly banal household objects, Groover lets their classical symbolism and iconography come to nothing; topics such as vanity, mortality or fertility, crucial to the painted equivalents, do not apply here and are insignificant for Groover’s pictorial universe.
The objects, plastic bottles, vessels, kitschy decorative objects, fruit and de Chirico-like architectural pieces such as columns testify to their era, whilst not being interpreted as such, but purely seen as forms among others.
The all-over of these at times exuberant photographs seems deliberate and at the same time masterful balance – Groover very subtly reflects the basic tenor of a decade in which visual and commodity-related overload took hold for the first time, but simultaneously glamour and optimism were flaunted. These enigmatic, extremely precisely crafted tableaux breathe the stuffy air of opulence in parts, while at the same time stating their mysterious elegance.

Jan Groover’s images don’t just resonate as a subtle record of feminism and the acceptance of photography as art, but also as extraordinary aesthetic investigations of a ‘fiction’ that is inseparably bound with the ‘factual’ conventions of the medium. Her work is still influencing subsequent generations of artists and, especially in light of current digital conventions and procedural image creation, appear both fascinatingly contemporary and inherently timeless.