The interplay between edged and angular and relaxed. A pictorial composition that in its ruptures turns its graphic lines inside out and interlocks them with an organic structure. Motifs that moves through the paintings dimly and like humorous caricatures. And the process of the art work’s genesis, where the silhouettes, lines, and fields – similar to the vibrating rhythm, of an inherent writing and drawing process – continually updates itself. All this associations seem to be appropriate to describe the mischievous formal game of hide and seek and disguise on the canvas through Jan-Ole Schiemann’s compositions evade the beholder’s gaze to the same degree to which they, just a moment later, reveal themselves as their own formal counterpart.
Based on a visual vocabulary of complex forms and surreal body fragments, Schiemann’s works oscillate playfully between the limits of abstract painting and anthropomorphic figuration. His pictorial worlds create a dense, sometimes transparent mesh that abandons the contours of clearly defined, special structures in favour of an ambivalent, cleverly interwoven composition. The structures of the pictorial space, created associatively on the basis of stencils and shadowy fields of ink, seem endless. They are delicately woven to form a superimposed net underneath the works, which, in the manner of collages, takes up the multiple references to comics, gestural abstraction, and early animation film in order to link them with references to Arshile Gorky’s post-cubist silhouettes or Carroll Dunham’s strangely fluid pictorial creatures.
Schiemann’s large works emerge not just in a dialogue with their references, but also link themselves in a continuous interchange to a formal language created by the artist in drawings and watercolours. In this language, pencil and ink organically outline details, dismember hybrid bodies, and link sections of lines – all this just to reshape themselves synthetically in the paintings in front of us into a wholly new visual universe.
Jan-Ole Schiemann (*1983 in Kiel), studied at the Kunsthochschule Kassel and graduated from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He lives and works in Cologne.
He had solo and group exhibitions at the Kunst-Station, Wolfsburg, DE | Kunstverein Heppenheim, DE | Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, BE | Kunstverein Aachen, DE | Almine Rech, Brussels, BE | Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, US | Nino Mier, Los Angeles, US / Brussels, BE / Cologne, DE | Choi & Lager Gallery, Seoul, KO.
In 2023 the artist will have a solo exhibition at the museum Neue Galerie Gladbeck in Germany.
Works of Jan-Ole Schiemann are in the collections of the Bronx Museum, New York; Craig Robins Collection, Miami; Hort Family Collection, New York; The Marciano Collection, Los Angeles; MOCAD Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Oetker Family Collection, Berlin; r/e collection, Spain | Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Martin Z. Margulies Warehouse Collection, Miami.
