Shore is pleased to invite you to ‘Ever After’, Julian-Jakob Kneer’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

In ‘Ever After’, the artist explores the intersections of love and death and the gamifications of the human condition. In a series of new wall works, 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. With funeral wreaths, adorned with celebratory hand-decorated silk ribbons, and a requiem sound score, Kneer explores the narcissistic drive of self-immortalizing martyrdom 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.

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 references, tradition and presence, forcing unprejudiced juxtapositions of seemingly opposite aesthetics, and evoking coincidental feelings of desire and repulsion.