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JARIK JONGMAN
A former assistant of Anselm Kiefer, Jarik Jongman uses both his own photographs and anonymous pictures found in flea markets, books, magazines and on the Internet as a starting point for his engagement with archetypal imagery.
Dutch born, he studied in Arnhem and has had numerous exhibitions in London, Berlin, Switzerland, Amsterdam and at the 53rd (2009) and 54th (2011) Venice Biennale in collateral events. He currently lives and works in Amsterdam.
(DE)FACING REVOLT (2012)
Jongman’s (de)facing revolt is a series of 10 painted portraits of icons of the contemporary art world: some of the richest and most influential players of our time, which he subsequently, with the help of the audience, defaced. The result is a series of mutilated, paint bombed and blowtorched images, reminiscent of the damaged murals and toppled statues of ousted dictators across the world.
Situated against the changes wrought by the Euro and international banking crises and the Arab Spring, (de)facing revolt attempts to materialize and subvert the violence of contemporary international politics – as particularly rendered by art world leaders of the West. As stand-ins for the Roman practice of damnation memoriae, or “condemnation of memory,” these defaced portraits symbolize both the general atmosphere of anger, revolt and iconoclasm so present in the world today and the shift away from western cultural dominance.
Art world superstars – Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, Charles Saatchi, etc. – and their accompanying platforms will likely feel the weight of such (r)evolution, perhaps leading to what Jongman hopes will be a more egalitarian system of art creation – already notable in digital and new media art.
As a political comment claimed within the safety of a gallery’s walls, Jongman’s work self-consciously reflects on the purposelessness of art in the art world today – a symbolic statement without risk, a salon revolution without victims, but a system in which the artist must still abide in order to survive.
Created and performed for MOMENTUM’s emerging artist exhibition About Face, the 10 paintings from (de)facing revolt have been donated to the gallery’s permanent collection.
For further information and photographs of (de)facing revolt visit: About Face
SACHSENHAUSEN (2009/10)
Predominantly a painter, the starting point for Jongman’s paintings is always photography. In the photo series Sachsenhausen, Jongman shows his photographs for the first time. These images were made during Jongman’s three-month Artist Residency in Berlin, in the winter of 2009-2010. Intended as studies for a series of paintings on places of trauma, these photos are snapshots taken from a moving car driving past the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, outside Berlin. Taken with a Lomo camera and presented digitally, the result merges the painterly, the photographic, and the cinematic.