Concept

-2017-

Involvement, participation and collaboration are the recurring topics of Christian Jankowski’s oeuvre. The inclusion of people from outside the artworld can be considered the core of his artistic practice.
In his new series NEUE MALEREI (New Painting), Jankowski connects photos of amateur tableau vivant artists, found in the world wide web, with professional painters from China. Tableau vivant translates as ‘living painting’ from French and describes the re-enactment of famous artworks with real people who pose motionless for an audience or a camera. These re-created master pieces of western painting history in tableaux vivants-style, brought him to the idea to translate these motives back to the medium of oil painting. The images found on the internet experience a diverse set of transformations: from the oil painted master piece, to a tableau vivant re-enactment, to a photograph posted to the world wide web and back to an oil-painting. Jankowski’s paintings use the size of the original masterpiece. The fields of untouched canvas indicate the proportional difference between photo and painting.
Arists on artists: It’s a layering of authorships that thanks to Jankowski bites it’s own tail. Many authors are involved and all of them contribute to the revitalisation of an icon.
Also: This series of oil paintings opens up a possible discourse about the internet as a mass medium but also about it’s possible democratizing effect. Since everybody can post his tableau vivant to the internet everybody gets the chance to be seen and to become an active part of art history. It also plays with the notion of participation and exclusion. Since art history is a highly exclusive field Jankowski opens it up again by treating amateurs the same way as Van Gogh, or Dürer by bringing them back to the canvas and potentially into a museum.

Paintings

Neue Malerei – Van Eyck, 82 x 60 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Dürer, 66 x 49 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Cranach, 21,7 x 17.1 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Brueghel, 116 x 161 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Caravaggio, 300 × 203 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Rembrandt, 216.5 × 169.5 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – David, 162 x 128 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Friedrich, 95.0 x 75 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Géricault, 491 x 716 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Spitzweg, 36 × 45 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Manet, 208 x 264 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Goya, 181.6 × 125 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Whistler, 144 x 162 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Van Gogh, 81.5 × 114.5 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Matisse, 73 x 92 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Kirchner, 168 x 126 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Dix, 121 x 89 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Wood, 78 x 65 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Picasso I,349 x 777 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Picasso II, 60 × 49 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Balthus, 149.9 x 129.5 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Picasso III, 63 x 52.5 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Lichtenstein, 90.2 x 96.5 cm, oil on canvas

Neue Malerei – Hockney, 305 x 213 cm, oil on canvas