Living Sculptures (2007) + Weather Flag (2019) 01.06.24 – 13.10.24

The models for Christian Jankowski’s “Living Sculptures” (2007) are street artists who are part of the city’s tourist attractions as living statues on Barcelona’s Las Ramblas. As much as these street artists are part of an urban culture and represent it through characteristic personalities, this relationship can also be alienated by the choice of characters. Unlike monuments, these artists are economically dependent on their daily audience. Jankowski’s selection makes this ambivalence visible: three depictions – Che Guevara, Julius Caesar and a figure from Salvador Dalí’s “Anthropomorphic Chest of Drawers”. The artist made life-size bronze casts of the sculptural figures and initially placed them in the places where he originally encountered them, before moving the sculptures to other locations, such as the Skulpturenpark Schwante.

“Whenever the wind is favorable”, Christian Jankowski instructed his gallerist José Garcia, he should send messages. In the course of an exhibition, Jankowski instructed the gallery to send letters written by him to curators, directors and other high-ranking figures in the art world with whom he had worked during his artistic career. Letters that he “always wanted to write but never did” were to be sent in his name when the wind was favorable. Jankowski takes up this idea again in his work “Weather Flag”, which was commissioned by curator Miguel Von Hafe Pérez in 2019. The flag features Jankowski himself, clutched tightly to the curator’s feet. Borrowed from Harold Lloyd’s iconic film scene, in which the US silent film actor hangs from the hand of an oversized clock, Jankowski’s “Weather Flag” refers to the dependency that exists between institutions and artists in the art world and places this in a metaphor of weather-related conditions: Thunderstorm! The wind is favorable! The mood has changed, the wind has shifted, the storm on the Bastille.