Sunday, June 22, 2025

The Sensual Politics of Jochen Klein

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ROME — At first, visiting Jochen Klein: After the Gentle on the Museum of Modern Artwork of Rome (MACRO) made me really feel misplaced. The exhibition options work by Klein with contributions by artists together with Julie Ault, Thomas Eggerer, Wolfgang Tillmans, Ull Hohn, and Amelie Von Wulffen, from the time they knew Klein. It’s a diversified group of artworks that seemingly struggles to type a cohesive message.  

Contextualizing Klein’s work just isn’t straightforward. Over a comparatively quick time, Klein shifted from conventional portray, which he had realized at Munich’s Academy of Positive Arts, to the conceptual method of the artist collective Group Materials when he moved to New York in 1994. Two years later he relocated to London and started growing the dreamy work that turned his signature model. He handed away because of AIDS-related issues in 1997 on the age of 30.

Visiting the present dropped at thoughts a well-known {photograph} of the artist taken by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans in 1997 when the 2 had been companions. Within the image, Klein is proven soaking in a bath with water up his neck. He appears pensive, misplaced in thought; along with his eyes half-closed, he doesn’t meet the digicam’s gaze. It’s an extremely intimate image, taken in a non-public second that we’re allowed a peek into. 

Jochen Klein, “Untitled” (1994), oil on canvas (courtesy Property of Jochen Klein and Galerie Buchholz)

The ambivalence that permeates Tillmans’s portrait precisely conveys the sensation some critics had when approaching Klein’s work. His episodic departure and return to portray have been interpreted as inconsistent and contradictory. However, as artist Julie Ault notes in a textual content featured within the exhibition, Klein’s position as a painter and his expertise inside Group Materials shouldn’t be learn in opposition. The artist’s work of luxurious Bavarian palace interiors that he made within the early Nineties — one among which is the spotlight of this exhibition — had been early investigations of the identical constructions of energy that Klein challenged along with his site-specific installations, made in collaboration with artist Thomas Eggerer just a few years later. 

The oneiric scenes of Klein’s later work, which he stored making till his sudden demise, are a putting mixture of political commentary and the sensuality of paint. As soon as I spotted this, the opposite artworks in After the Gentle took up that means, and the whole lot finally fell into place. In Klein’s work, the crucial construction and the sheer pleasure of portray are inextricable.  

Exhibition view of Jochen Klein, After The Gentle at MACRO, 2023 (picture by Melania Dalle Grave – DSL Studio)

Jochen Klein: After the Gentle continues on the Museum of Modern Artwork of Rome (MACRO) (Through Nizza 138, Rome, Italy) by August 27. The exhibition was co-curated by Luca Lo Pinto and Wolfgang Tillmans.

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