John Kørner: Cosmopolitan Super Fruits

About

Following Intercontinental Super Fruits, John Kørner’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States (on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit from November 2021 until January 2022), this exhibition builds on themes of consumerism, globalisation and networks of distribution and exchange. Cosmopolitan Super Fruits takes as a starting point the idea of the corner shop, a place of supply and consumption familiar to us all. Always treating content with various degrees of abstraction and metaphor, in this body of work Kørner brings into focus modes of display (fruit on the tree and vine, and picked, packaged and on the shelf) and the movement of foodstuffs as they collide with aspects of contemporary politics and ecological thought in the context of ever-evolving concepts of the local, regional, national and global.

Nourishment – the life-enhancing properties of fruit and the visual and intellectual sustenance of art – is a connecting theme. So too is seduction – fruit’s ingenious ways of drawing attention to itself in order to disseminate its seed, versus the artist’s deployment of brushmark and colour to carry, Trojan horse-like, a barrage of ideas. In this regard fruit, a traditional subject in art history and a longstanding motif in Kørner’s art, is deployed to raise questions that place the viewer/consumer squarely at the centre.