Christian Jankowski “2017”

Petzel Gallery

This event has ended.

June 2016: Jankowski’s two-year curatorial commitment ends as Manifesta 11 opens in Zurich; the artist begins work for Petzel’s January 2017 show.

November 6th, 2016: Donald J. Trump is elected to be the 45th President of the United States.

The Petzel show is canceled.

January 2017: We need to talk… opens at Petzel; the new president is sworn in; women march on Washington. In spring, London begins divorce proceedings from Europe; Macron wins the presidency of France. Early summer, and the Rohingya crisis swells in Myanmar; global markets soar; the world continues to warm. In the fall, Mohammad bin Salman begins to remake Saudi Arabia; Mosul is liberated; hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria devastate huge swathes of the Gulf Coast and Puerto Rico. As the sun sets on 2017, the Weinstein scandal breaks; Robert Mugabe falls; Catalonia’s autonomy is suspended.

For Jankowski, 2017 begins with a jarring slip—an election derails his third solo show at Petzel, his first New York show in five years. The postponement is detoxifying; as the year progresses, time becomes the transformative force. 2017 mines the significance of art within an art historical framework, often overlaying one time period with another—masterpieces of western painting, the Internet age, and Chinese experts in replication merge and intersect in his Neue Malerei series. Massage Masters, Walking Logic, and The Loan, transpose the new with the atavistic—master masseuses apply techniques used on the human body to sculpture; the stabilizing influence of the walking stick is made cogent, while the ritual pain of loss is examined in The Loan. In a twelve-month period, Jankowski revisits, reworks, and reconsiders concepts and practices within his oeuvre, to produce work in 2017 that is itself dilated, distorted, and re-envisioned by time.

Christian Jankowski was born in 1968 in Göttingen, Germany and lives and works in Berlin.