Christian Junghanns

New works

15 February - 27 April 2014

Closely associated with American Pop Art of the 70s and 80s, Junghanns continues on his path of painting, linking Pop Art and comic art with classical Modernism.
Christian Junghanns, born 1970 in Hanover, studied visual communication at the Berlin University of the Arts, among other things. He lives and works in Munich.

A picture that evokes an impression.
A picture that only emerges in the mind of the viewer.

A picture that is and remains free and malleable by its very nature.

A picture like a smell or scent.

A picture like a taste, a composition that reveals its essence only and only on the palate of the eater.

A trick, a twist. (CJ)

This programmatic desire is at the forefront of the works on display at Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim.

Here, as the younger representative of German Pop Art, Junghanns spans a stylistically confident arc between analog and digital drawing.
 His group of drawings, which Junghanns began over 20 years ago and which he produces exclusively on DIN A4 paper, marks the entrance area of the exhibition on a yellow background. These drawings are to be read as attempts to visualize thoughts and ideas and to create as unpretentiously as possible a world of figures in analogy to one's own self. Always with the aim of ensuring an unhindered flow from the "inside". From this "primordial soup of iconography" Junghanns fished his ideas for the large-format works on canvas.

Already since the early noughties Junghanns has been using the computer mouse as a drawing medium. Long before the discussions about the digital and post-digital ages began, he created a new free space for himself in which his "non-physical" drawings were created. What I appreciate about working with the mouse is the non-physical, rather left-handed nature of it, even in the truest sense of the word, says Junghanns, and compares this kind of drawing with woodcarving.
 He is attracted by the unexpected and chance, by the surprise in which direction the drawing process goes and the speed with which this happens. At the same time, it is also the immaterial fleetingness of these mouse drawings that formulates his own aesthetic approach.

Junghanns also creates his pictures from the fund thus gained. He transforms the digital drawings into analogue painting without denying the origin of his pictures: his painted pictures bear unmistakable traces of the computer mouse, which are made of intentional traces. Between the individual strokes, there are always remnants and snippets that remain while drawing with the computer mouse. The airiness thus gained enables Junghanns to come closer to his desire to create a picture that is completely assembled only in the mind of the viewer.

Further information is available at www.neopop.de  
www.christianjunghanns.com

A catalogue has been published for the exhibition.

Press Release Animation Film

The poster "Goldkeil" in the format 70 x 100 cm was published for the exhibition (see illustration). Gallery price Euro 10,- (signed Euro 15,-).

The exhibition is supported by:
Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony, City of Neuenhaus


Accompanying program:
Sunday, 23 March 2014, 11.15 a.m, "It's him" fairy tales, stories and ballads told by Heike Koschnicke and Sibylle Renardy-Platen
Tuesday, March 25, 8 pm, Workshop talk with Christian Junghanns
Wednesday, 26 March, 1.30 pm, workshop for students with Christian Junghanns
Thursday, March 27, 7 p.m, Siegfried Hentke's lecture: "POP-ART, what is it?"
Holiday offer for children during the easter holidays each from 15 to 17 o'clock under the motto "To your heart's content"

Parallel 24: Anke Baumeister