Jan-Ole Schiemann's paintings show playful yet complex structures: evolved painting techniques using ink and acrylic paint are sometimes combined to create condensed surreal compositions or expressive abstract worlds of forms. His gestural lines format contoured shapes - sometimes geometric, sometimes biomorphic - which the artist weaves into painted hybrids, playing them off against each other or allowing them to work in symbiotic harmony. Schiemann uses various canvas formats and image carriers as a visual playground that allows him to analyse, dissect or even question his varied formal language and idiosyncratic sign systems with their amorphous fragments and colour surfaces.
For the exhibition in Gladbeck, Schiemann has created a new cycle of works and produced an installation especially for the Neue Galerie. The artist's painterly spatial installation is like a cartographic landscape of impressions and possibilities that the eye wanders over and invites us to move through the paintings. The expressive is made physically tangible beyond the visual, without lifting us out of the role of observer with immersive gimmickry. The large-format paintings that Schiemann produced for the gallery's new building seem to build up an intrinsic system of references that functions via signs, colour and gestures and merges into a fantastic cosmos of painterly phenomena and open narratives.
