Thilo Jenssen: Smooth Operator Event

We are looking forward to seeing you at Franz-Josefs-Kai for the opening of Smooth Operator with Vienna-based artist Thilo Jenssen.

Thilo Jenssen’s (*1984 in Daun, Germany) works entice with their reflecting, smooth-polished surfaces in shimmering, glittering, and sometimes fluctuating colors, a structure that is reminiscent of screens. His Paintings are charged with contemporary impulses, distancing themselves from a purely historical attribution to the Finish Fetish movement that emerged in Southern California in the 1960s from an automotive cult widespread on the West Coast.

Smooth Operator, is derived from the series Stabile Zustände, a compilation of various illustrations of the “stable side position”, a recovery position, and is based on a medical handbook from 1975, from which he fragmentarily extracts images of first-aid measures and creates intimate and sometimes grotesque moments through their selective cropping. The original didactic purpose of these illustrations is thus rewritten by Jenssen, thereby representing a new coding of the acquired signs, exploring the ambivalent relationship between support and restriction, control and support.

Based on a text by Andrea Kopranovic of Galerie Christine König, Vienna.

Coinciding with the show, on the same floor, gallery Magdalena Zeller are opening Hug of Death with Melanie Ebenhoch, Sophie Gogl, Julija Zaharijević and Malte Zander.