Jonas Roßmeißl*
Die neue Statik | a new static
Jonas Roßmeißl, Freiheitsstatue, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Klemm’s, Berlin.
Jonas Roßmeißl, Freiheitsstatue (detail), 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Klemm’s, Berlin.
Roßmeißl‘s works appear like artefacts from a new Dark Age, as if the collective gaze of history has concentrated itself and conjured into being those elements before which we are driven, in the midst of which we are harrowed: relentless forces and immoveable objects, breakdown and motion, slick- ness and friction, the grip and rub of industrial process cohering into metonymic moments of dialectical torque.
Reuvane David Simmons, Jonas Roßmeißl’s Sculpture and the Histories of Force, 2020
Die neue Statik | a new static, Jonas Roßmeißl. Credit: Shilin Zhu, Chi Zhang, Jonas Roßmeißl.
Die Neue Statik / a new Static, which is presented as part of Gallery Weekend *Discoveries, is the first solo exhibition by Jonas Roßmeißl at Klemm’s.
Jonas Roßmeißl is developing his work according to a critical-emphatic analysis of social conditions. He questions prevailing concepts of the public sphere, identity and intimacy as well as the associated possibilities, conditions and forms of their representation: What is the state of the utopia of collectivity and political spaces of action under repressive systems and the influence of technology and rationalised re- production in the present? What is the situation regarding vulnerability and empathy? Is there still a will and potential to break out and change? What could this look like?
Jonas Roßmeißl approaches these comprehensive themes through intensive research and permeation of his subjects combined with the ability to make employed materials, technical know-how, and production processes literally his own. Roßmeißl creates sculptures and complex multi-part settings: sometimes hermetically contained, with a calculated fetishistic air, sometimes rather sprawling apparatuses of a dystopian future. Always appealing and appalling at the same time. Radically interdisciplinary and immensely precise, Roßmeißl’s work develops its own distinct aesthetics: historical motifs, information and material attributions of the collective (sub)consciousness are combined in his sculptures, preserved into another world – amalgamated with machines and technology.
At first glance, the works appear to be destructive in nature, modern ruins. But they quickly establish a different, more lasting impression: they manifest their idiosyncratic interpretation of a contemporary Luddism and radically open iconoclasm that already bears within it’s disruptive potential to reformulate its creative force.
Portrait Jonas Roßmeißl. Credit: Helena Kühnemann
History, in these sculptures, becomes not just a monument to struggle but a part of the struggle itself. And in the re-covery, the re-articulation, of that process, they in turn orientate themselves towards an unwritten future – they become as much a vision of the future as they are a critique of the present, or subversion of the past.
Reuvane David Simmons, Jonas Roßmeißl’s Sculpture and the Histories of Force, 2020.
Jonas Roßmeißl, Widerstandsreduzierterkörper in Polierstufe, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Klemm’s, Berlin.
For his exhibition Die Neue Statik / a new static, Jonas Roßmeißl embarks on a search for a feeling that has become increasingly palpable not only since the global stress tests of recent times: everything is racing, but nothing is moving. A ‘new static’ arises from the sensation of standstill with simultaneous acceleration… Last, but not least, the potential for lasting alienation lurks in the constant state of self- assurance. The human capacity for habituation, for ‘settling’ into repressive systems – technological imperative, data control, social-media, 5G, gig-economy, the list goes on – does not make this any less palpable…
In Die Neue Statik / a new static this sensation becomes tangible. Endlessly running gear wheels eat their way through various image carriers, destruction and resilience in perfect balance. The Statue of Liberty and the garden gnome emerge in battered fragments – you want to take away their phantom pain while they compete for attention with a chrome flashing, perfectly reflecting object that is all the less tangible for it. Roßmeißl keeps his sculpture ensemble under immense tension and also embeds it in a complex infrastructure of activation and disturbance. The ever-same logic of image production, distribution and increasingly less conscious consumption is suspended and reconfigured. By means of two fundamental interventions in the exhibition space, immediacy, physical reflex, as well as impression and material presence of the objective world take first place in perception. In this way, Roßmeißl’s works function like allegories of a future scenario. They hit us with their enigmatic presence touch something that seemed almost lost and therefore resonates for a particularly long time: our human instinct.
Jonas Roßmeißl, Nachtwächter, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Klemm’s, Berlin.
Jonas Roßmeißl, Die neue Statik | a new static, 2021, installation view, at Klemm’s, Berlin. Courtesy of the artist and Klemm’s, Berlin.
Die Neue Statik / a new static will be integrated and expanded by a publication written by Natalya Serkova (Tzvetnik) and Felix Trautmann (Frankfurt Institute for Social Research), which will be published in October 2021.
Jonas Roßmeißl (b. 1995, Erlangen, Germany) lives and works in Leipzig and Uttenreuth (Germany). He has studied media art with Prof Peggy Buth at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig (HGB, Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig). Roßmeißl’s works have been the subject of various solo and group exhibitions, including: Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (Germany); Zitadelle (Museum: Berlin und seine Denkmäler), Berlin (Germany); Domizil Büro, Leipzig (Germany); Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (Germany); Kunstverein Leipzig (Germany); Neues Museum, Nuremberg (Germany); Galerie KLEMM`s, Berlin (Germany).