Jan Zöller, born 1992 in Haslach i. Kinzigtal, Germany. He lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany

“Sculpture running away from the Opening”, shows long-legged fountain figures running panic-stricken from the left- to the right-hand side of the painting, while doing so sloshing red wine from the glasses of the opening. Zöller playfully allows the sculptures to break free from their role – is the exhibition opening or even the art world itself so terrible to cause one to run away from it? He unflinchingly reiterates and variegates individual motives in his work, happily inverting them and reducing accepted ideas of their meaning and classification to absurdity. In his stage-like landscapes, half-moons obtrude into the wedge-shaped spotlights of glowing celestial bodies, mask-like birds’ heads collectively draw on a cigarette that ramifies like the branches of a tree, its smoke rising eerily into a spectral S-shape in the sky. Zöller combines emblematic graphics with luminous colours and sharply contoured figures, weaving expressive, atmospheric forms and markings into his worlds. The layers of the image accumulate, surfaces, shapes and figures are superimposed, images appear within images, which in turn reference each other. By doing so, Jan Zöller develops an intelligent painterly practice without illustrating rhetorical figures; instead, they appear through his interest in the ambivalent associations between everything in the world and are thus an indispensable part of his visual dramaturgy.


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