Jonathan Meese EZ 2002 Oil on canvas (in three parts). 82 5/8 x 165 3/8 in. (209.9 x 420.1 cm) overall. Signed, titled and dated “EZ Die 23 Stallungen ‘Ezra Pound’ JMeese 2002” on the reverse of middle panel; signed and dated “JMeese 2002” lower left.
Provenance Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin Exhibited Berlin, Contemporary Fine Arts, Jonathan Meese Young Americans, April 20 - June 22, 2002; Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover, Jonathan Meese Revolution, November 23, 2002 - January 26, 2003; Detroit, Kommando Freiderichschiller, November 4, 2003 - January 10, 2004 Literature Contemporary Fine Arts, ed., Jonathan Meese Young Americans, Berlin, 2002, pp. 10-11 (illustrated); H. Falckenberg, “Beyond Good and Evil: The Jonathan Meese Phenomenon,” in C. Ahrens, C. Haenlein, eds., Jonathan Meese Revolution, Hannover, 2002, pp. 112-113 (illustrated) and 131 Catalogue Essay A self-proclaimed cultural exorcist, Berlin’s young bad-boy art star Jonathan Meese combines the Postmodern fetish for cultural appropriation and visual quotation with a violent, expressive aesthetic that crackles with the visceral brutality of Modernist styles such as abstract expressionism and action painting. He has carved out a persona as the artist-as-prophet, a schizophrenic, soothsaying savant with a window onto the future primitive: in his oeuvre the instinct for self-mythologizing coalesces with a knack for producing imagery whose sublime vulgarity is like a cracked funhouse mirror reflecting the failings of contemporary society and demonic apparitions of an apocalyptic future. “I exhume to consume,” claims Meese, “my body is the reactor in a huge rubbish-recycling experiment of leaden world and intoxicated images,” (J. Meese, during a performance at the Paolo Curti Gallery, May 3rd 2000). Into that reactor goes all manner of cultural debris: historical epics, comic books, propaganda, B-movies, pulp posters, religious iconography, graffiti, Pop, and poetry; what comes out are chaotic horror vacui and inscriptions in a cryptic language of the artist’s creativity. In EZ, Meese references Ezra Pound, whose expatriate American poetry greatly influenced Europe’s Modernist revolution. EZ, 2002, is an archetypal Meese: a monumentally large triptych that simmers with an earthy palette of blacks, browns, whites and blood reds with thick paint that is pushed and pulled, sculpted and deconstructed. Like a satanic perversion of a medieval altarpiece, it depicts two peripheral figures floating over abstract backgrounds dominated by black and white, their bodies seemingly scratched apart and sewn back together in a mess of claws and spiked appendages; they direct their massive erections at a seated central figure in clergyman’s black attire. Spectacular in scale, ominous in tone, radiating an air of ambiguously sexual violence and pulsating with an anarchic energy, EZ is a quintessential example of Meese’s macabre visions of a society in dereliction. Read More
Jonathan Meese EZ 2002 Oil on canvas (in three parts). 82 5/8 x 165 3/8 in. (209.9 x 420.1 cm) overall. Signed, titled and dated “EZ Die 23 Stallungen ‘Ezra Pound’ JMeese 2002” on the reverse of middle panel; signed and dated “JMeese 2002” lower left.
Provenance Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin Exhibited Berlin, Contemporary Fine Arts, Jonathan Meese Young Americans, April 20 - June 22, 2002; Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover, Jonathan Meese Revolution, November 23, 2002 - January 26, 2003; Detroit, Kommando Freiderichschiller, November 4, 2003 - January 10, 2004 Literature Contemporary Fine Arts, ed., Jonathan Meese Young Americans, Berlin, 2002, pp. 10-11 (illustrated); H. Falckenberg, “Beyond Good and Evil: The Jonathan Meese Phenomenon,” in C. Ahrens, C. Haenlein, eds., Jonathan Meese Revolution, Hannover, 2002, pp. 112-113 (illustrated) and 131 Catalogue Essay A self-proclaimed cultural exorcist, Berlin’s young bad-boy art star Jonathan Meese combines the Postmodern fetish for cultural appropriation and visual quotation with a violent, expressive aesthetic that crackles with the visceral brutality of Modernist styles such as abstract expressionism and action painting. He has carved out a persona as the artist-as-prophet, a schizophrenic, soothsaying savant with a window onto the future primitive: in his oeuvre the instinct for self-mythologizing coalesces with a knack for producing imagery whose sublime vulgarity is like a cracked funhouse mirror reflecting the failings of contemporary society and demonic apparitions of an apocalyptic future. “I exhume to consume,” claims Meese, “my body is the reactor in a huge rubbish-recycling experiment of leaden world and intoxicated images,” (J. Meese, during a performance at the Paolo Curti Gallery, May 3rd 2000). Into that reactor goes all manner of cultural debris: historical epics, comic books, propaganda, B-movies, pulp posters, religious iconography, graffiti, Pop, and poetry; what comes out are chaotic horror vacui and inscriptions in a cryptic language of the artist’s creativity. In EZ, Meese references Ezra Pound, whose expatriate American poetry greatly influenced Europe’s Modernist revolution. EZ, 2002, is an archetypal Meese: a monumentally large triptych that simmers with an earthy palette of blacks, browns, whites and blood reds with thick paint that is pushed and pulled, sculpted and deconstructed. Like a satanic perversion of a medieval altarpiece, it depicts two peripheral figures floating over abstract backgrounds dominated by black and white, their bodies seemingly scratched apart and sewn back together in a mess of claws and spiked appendages; they direct their massive erections at a seated central figure in clergyman’s black attire. Spectacular in scale, ominous in tone, radiating an air of ambiguously sexual violence and pulsating with an anarchic energy, EZ is a quintessential example of Meese’s macabre visions of a society in dereliction. Read More
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