Jan-Ole Schiemann: By Golly!

About

The title of the exhibition refers to the eponymous poem by the jazz musician Sun Ra, who died in 1993 and was known for his experimental, avant-garde pieces and already a myth during his lifetime. He polarized critics as well as audiences with his individual style and innovative ideas. Free jazz is a music style that often seems uncontrollably wild at first, but yet follows a formal rhythm in its improvisation and composition. A similar experience occurs when we look at the paintings of Cologne based artist Jan-Ole Schiemann. His pictorial compositions of oil and acrylic paint, drawing ink and oil pencil initially defy interpretation and present a tangle of lines and colors, which after a longer observation gradually reveal their own rhythm. What emerges is an interplay of graphic and organic lines, complex shapes and surreal body fragments, and transparent and colored surfaces. The structures of the pictorial space, created associatively on the basis of stencils and shadowy ink surfaces, seem endless. They are delicately woven to form a superimposed net underneath the works, which, like a collage, includes multiple references from comics, gestural abstraction, and early animation film.