JONATHAN MEESE. KÉPI BLANC, NACKT
16. January - 12. April 2004

Jonathan Meese provokes and polarizes his audience. Whether film, radio, TV program, or history book: nobody featuring in one of these seems to be safe from becoming part of the German new star’s installations. Various figures and their attitudes clash in Meese’s flood of pictures, neologisms, texts, and objects: Stanley Kubrick meets Richard Wagner, Stalin encounters Zardoz; Heidegger, Klaus Kinski, Hitler, Marquis de Sade, Mishima, Balthus, Romy Schneider, Dr. No, virgins, and busty girls are just some of the figures populating his pseudo-psychotic universe of art. In the fadeovers blending myth, art, and politics, the boundaries between different notions characterizing a distanced contemplation of the world blur. Squeezing in between all people and things, Meese, with an unbridled joy in playing and a pleasure in incorrectness, creates a religion, a cult which is fuelled by both the past and present of his personal sphere and world history.