We are pleased to present our first exhibition of the work of painter Jonas Maas on April 19th, 2013 at 7pm. This year, Maas will graduate from the Du?sseldorf Kunstakademie under the tutelage of Professor Tomma Abts. He studied previously under Winifried Virnich at the Kunsthochschule in Mainz.
 
The end or death of painting is a stale topic. Time and again the impracticality of painting has been postulated and time after time apologists are found, who defend painting as a form of artistic expression, if nothing else, becuase the art itself provides new arguements. So it would be mundane , to see Jonas Maas and his works against this background and raise them as arguements for painting. It is much more fruitful to analyse what it is the artist Jonas Maas actually makes.
 
In our exhibition we show UV-Prints (on wood or Aluminum plating), mixed- technique on wood and three dimensional, relief-like angle-shaped works of wood and metal installed so they appear to hover over the wall.
 
The UV-Print has a highly complicated working method, which involves screens, reflections or infilling of such screens. Maas develops these “products” in a long processes.These are comparable with painterly approaches not just becuase there is a similar forward and back also found in painting, in which the artist must continuously adapt the work until they hopefully agree with the result, but because Maas, in a sense, begins with empty canvas, the empty page. He does not work from templates, which is how one could regularly describe the work in Photoshop, rather he creates something new from the program. To get to the point, these new creations cannot be described as abstract, because nothing is being reduced, rather they are concrete in the sense that they are something that have originated on their own with no precedence in the “real world”. The “point” is a keyword that deserves to be highlighted because Maas works with grids and other tools which give rise to the print image. Instead of answering these purposes and there for allowing for knowledge acquisition Maas leaves the viewer unclear. Without further clarification, such as the data sets that have been adapted in order to create the astonishing Moire Effectss or the forward and back to get to specific pictoral elements, are not the works.
 
Maas‘ “classical” paintings, those that are created using paint and a paintbrush or other tools, such as a sirbrush or roller on a surface are comparable in the sense that they are once again not a depiction or abstraction. Rather they are often times a playful handling of opposites such as “soft and hard”, “picture and relief”, “transparency and density” and “glossy and matte”. The painting, or should I say object (?) morever possess a formst hat are widely removed from the classical, right-angle or oval panel paintings. One a rhombus, another one in two layers, a rectangle and a rhombus, another cut like Swiss Cheese, these geometric forms are no longer definitively flat. Which shows how important the matierialization of his works, that the works in a wordy sense are brought about. We know such processes namely from the shaped canvases of the 1960’s.
 
Finally, we also see technical looking frame, with two sides of a rectange could certainly be read- if one so wished- as simply half a picture. Colorfully painted paper is also in an angle form. They do not appear exclusively on the inside of the frames rather they regularly protrude from the outer edges. What is actually framed here, the painted page, the wood ort he metal angle remains unclear. Moreover these works are installed with a 10-12 cm gap between the wall, so that they appear to hover, highlighting the scultural characteristics of the piece.
 
Classical hierarchies of sculpture and painting over graphics, are subverted by Maas‘ operating principles. No groups appear that seem to belong to one another, rather Maas’ expects a synesthestic view of his work, that are accepted and endure next to one another. It always avoids the boundaries and possibilities of painting and how we fathom these. In conclusion we see visually unsettling, part impressive, part confusing , objects or pictures. Also if these works possess no socio-political narrative and therefore no direct responsibility, not even to the subject of the painting, they appear to act as a connection between the contemporary digital world and the old analog world. Maas does not make digital art but he does use the computer as an additional painterly tool.
 
For further information or images, please contact the gallery.

Art Brut and Outsider Art have long influenced the classic modern art movements of its time: artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Surrealists such as Max Ernst and André Breton, and Jean Dubuffet identified themselves radically with the creative processes and the imagery of the cultural outsider who opened a whole new view of the world. Contemporary artists such as Arnulf Rainer, Rosemarie Trockel, the Chapman brothers and Mike Kelley show in their works and their work processes, that they can hardly resist the spell. On occasion of the gallery‘s 25th Anniversary, the artist Michael Bauer ventures into the gallery archive and selects a personal and representative choice of historical and contemporary works. A tribute to the tradition of the “artists’s art” and a glimpse of the treasures of the gallery program.
 
Michael Bauer, * 1973 in Erkelenz, lives and works in New York.
Since its founding year in 1988, Galerie Susanne Zander has come to establish itself internationally as one of the leading galleries for Outsider Art and Art Brut, dedicating its program from the onset exclusively to outstanding marginal artistic positions both historical as well as contemporary. In recent years, the gallery owners Nicole Delmes and Susanne Zander have become increasingly interested in the what can be termed as “Conceptual Outsider Art,” raising new questions about common practices of curation and notions of reception, production and historical contextualization of singular artistic positions that are labeled as “Outsider Art” and which at the same time resort to common strategies of contemporary art.
Susanne Zander has co-curated a series of pioneering exhibitions for museums and art societies amongst which “Obsession” (with Morton Bartlett, Henry Darger, 2000, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, DE) and “The Message - The Medium as an Artist” (2008, Museum Bochum, DE) and has played a significant advisory role in the exhibition series “Secret Universe” (2011 - 2013, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, DE). The gallery releases publications on a regular basis such as Horst Ademeit – Living in The Radiant Cold (2010), The Message - Art and Occultism (2008), Foma Jaremtschuk (2008), Obsession (2000) or more recently Margret: Chronik einer Affäre (2012).
Over the last 25 years the gallery has brought the art of the Outsider to the attention of collectors and curators, positioning formerly unknown artists such as Miroslav Tichy and Henry Darger onto the art market as early as the 1990's. The discovery of Horst Ademeit in 2008 brought the gallery into the focus of contemporary Outsider Art unleashing once again the debate on common notions of “inside” and “outside” art.