Julian-Jakob Kneer
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2021
1992
Austria
Shore
Julian-Jakob Kneer, HIGH-RISE BERLIN, Schinkel Pavillon, 2021 (Online)
Life is a game and love is the price.
- 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
"In Kneer’s work, which mostly consists of carefully crafted sculptures, the aesthetics are of a darker romanticism and form their own kind of Gothic imagination. They are nonetheless haunted by a sense of ambivalence. This œuvre marks a new facet of the Gothic that takes inspiration from the mode’s perennial concerns with the uncanny and the antinomies of life/death, ancient/modern, avant-garde/kitsch, unconscious/conscious, realistic/artificial, while also incorporating more youthful antinomies such as, pretty/ugly, sick/healthy, predator/victim, and right/wrong."
- DEATH IS THE MARTYR OF BEAUTY, CÆSURA, Laurie Rojas
Julian-Jakob Kneer (born in Basel, CH)
Selected exhibitions & projects:
TBA ,brunand brunand, Berlin, DE (solo)
Liste Art Fair Basel, Shore, Basel, CH (solo)
True Romance, Shore, Vienna, AT
HIGH-RISE BERLIN, Schinkel Pavillon, Online
Situation 1 und andere, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, CH
Liste Art Fair Basel, Shore, Online (solo)
EVER AFTER, Shore, Vienna, AT (solo)
Art Düsseldorf, Lucas Hirsch shared with Damien & The Love Guru, Düsseldorf, DE
Cold Prey, Lubov Gallery, New Yor ...
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2020
1992
Austria
Shore
"Julian-Jakob Kneer explores the intersections of love and death and the gamifications of the human condition. (...) 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
LOSVER (life is a game and love is the price), 2019, varnish on polyurethane foam, 185 x 133 x 23 cm
Lachen ist die schönste Art Zähne zu zeigen, 2020, digital print on puzzle, 41 x 31 x 2,5 cm, photographer: Pavel Woznicki
Julian-Jakob Kneer (*1992 in Basel) lives and works in Berlin.
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 referenc ...