Julian-Jakob Kneer at Shore

Artist: Julian-Jakob Kneer

Exhibition title: Ever After

Venue: Shore, Vienna, Austria

Date: November 30, 2019 – January 19, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Shore, Vienna

In ‘Ever After‘, Julian-Jakob Kneer explores the intersections of love and death and the gamifications of the human condition. In a series of new wall works, a floor strewn with roses, and a requiem sound score whose recipient might just be the artist himself, Kneer reflects on the performative act of self-killing as an act of love and scrutinizes the psychological underpinnings and pop-cultural depictions of romantic suicide.

The narcissistic drive of self-immortalizing martyrdom is explored through placeholder archetypes that present the subject as both culprit and victim, agent and voyeur, lover and loser. Addressing the subjects only in reference, the works grapple with vanity, loneliness and the burden and promise of mortality and immortality.

– Nele Ruckelshausen

Wake me up when it’s all over.
– Avicii, 2013
Lachen ist die schönste Art Zähne zu zeigen.
– Werner Finck, 1968
Ich bin bereit, denn es ist Zeit
für unser’n Pakt über die Ewigkeit.
— Falco, Out Of The Dark, 1998
Have someone else’s will as your own,
you are beautiful and you are alone.
– Nico, Afraid, 1970

In his artistic practice, Kneer investigates the contingency of inherited sociocultural symbol and allocation systems. Central to his work is the examination of the subconscious, ‘abnormal’ or ‘pathological’ deviances as judged from a bourgeois-normative perspective. This includes artefacts and phenomena depicted in everyday and popular culture, commonly situated beyond ‘good taste’ and between kitsch and camp. Ambivalence is an important keyword to his practice as it forms irritating syntheses of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural references, tradition and presence, forcing unprejudiced juxtapositions of seemingly opposite aesthetics, and evoking coincidental feelings of desire and repulsion.

Julian-Jakob Kneer (b. 1992, Basel CH) lives and works in Berlin.

Recent presentations include: Lubov Gallery x Underground Flower, New York; Main Street, Toronto; Limbo, Berlin; Lucas Hirsch, Düsseldorf; Horse & Pony, Berlin; fffriedrich, Frankfurt am Main; Center, Berlin and Geddert Hronjec Collection, Berlin.