Jupp Linssen

Kompakt

Opening: Tuesday, February 19th 2013, 7 PM
Exhibition: February 20th – March 23rd 2013

German artist Jupp Linssen, born in 1957 in Kempen am Niederrheim, has developed a unique style of making work and an inimitable pictorial language in the course of his oeuvre.

Lifting up a picture from its usual two dimensions into a third, letting it become a bodily experience, and therefore giving its metaphysical depth and significance a visual, tangible space, and through this building an objective barrier from the sensual barrier within the viewer’s own space, this might be the closest way to describe Jupp Linssen’s working method.

He layers materials in broken rhythms on top of each other, he creates airy volumes out materials otherwise foreign to art and undermines the academic tradition from within the artistic context.

To Linssen, formal beauty is irrelevant, at least insofar as the pictorial body does not have to be pressed into a frame, the surface does not have to be smooth, the material does not have to be new and fresh.

His pieces produced for a spatial context are all about being believable. They don’t hide their underlying production process.

They evoke memories. They toy with romantic elements as well as pragmatic necessities.

The artist’s objective is that his artworks aren’t detached from reality – quite the opposite: He wants his pieces to become an integral part of reality.

Unlike the usual, sometimes reasonable criticism directed at abstract art, that it would only claim to be smart because it could be everything and nothing, Linssen’s pieces contain real veracity, real sincerity, real intelligence and real reflection.

They don’t presuppose the viewer’s understanding. They work it out.


(Text Excerpts: Stefan Skowron: Jupp Linssen, Gebaute Bilder, Built-up Pictures)