Jochen Kuhn

Jochen Kuhn, born in 1954 in Germany, makes short animated films that operate along the border between film and painting and are regularly shown on the festival circuit. This is his first solo exhibition in Switzerland, and it includes three films—Sonntag 1 (Sunday 1), 2005; Neulich 5 (Recently 5), 2004; and Die Beichte (The Confession), 1990—that display his artisanal precision, as well as a selection of paintings, drawings, and photographs that document the inspirations of his filmic art practice. All of Kuhn’s unmistakable films have a poetic and melancholy beauty, generated in part by his process: The artist constantly wipes out and blurs each hand-painted image in order to create the next. The viewer observes this continual erasure and creation—a process quite different from that of classical animation. In Sonntag 1, the artist’s alter ego walks along the empty streets in an urban landscape, accompanied by Kuhn’s own interior monologue: “This Sunday something really upsetting happened: I noticed that nothing captured my attention. Nothing struck me. . . . Of course, there were different trivial things . . . but nothing really remarkable. I stayed relaxed and simply continued.” One easily disappears into Kuhn’s world, which lies between mundane desolation and the dreaminess of the celestial spheres.

Translated from German by Jane Brodie.