Jonathan Meese - Biography

Especially with the artist Jonathan Meese, the idea seems to find his confirmation that knowledge of the artist biography can be necessary or at least helpful in order to get closer to the work of an artist. Because the work of Jonathan Meese is everything, but certainly not easy to understand, and his life path actually gives the recipient indications of why this is - and should be like that.

Jonathan Meese is an international child , born in 1970 in Tokyo, with a German mother and an English father. The parents separated even when they were inferred, the mother returned to Germany with Jonathan and his two older siblings, the father stayed in Japan.

The child quickly learned his first cultural shock: little Jonathan only spoke Japanese and, as a “foreigner” in the school, had considerable difficulty adjustment. Which he was able to overcome at primary school, at least as far as the communication skills are concerned, was definitely enough for the university entrance qualification, Meese graduated from a high school in the new home town of Ahrensburg in 1989.

this time, Meteese was obviously less clear what approach should follow the seriousness of life .

So after graduating from high school, his mother first sent him to Scotland to learn English, but Meese still had no idea what to do after his return. So his mother registered him for studying the economy, which the obedient son also included, but Brigitte Meese quickly saw that it was "a total disaster" (the World week, edition 26/2006 of February 2, 2013).

At the age of 22, Jonathan Meese had his own future -oriented idea for the first time and wanted a drawing block and painting utensils for his birthday, not to enthusiastic his single and education with this upbringing.

However, the son prevailed, followed by drawing courses at the adult education center, a room full of relays and large, painted canvases (Mesees bed had to hike into the living room due to lack of space) and a little later the approximately three days of making a folder with which he was applied and immediately accepted university of the fine arts in Hamburg

From 1995 to 1998 Meese studied, in the belief in the people who had told him that you could learn art at the university. Perhaps he had not completely overcome the adaptation difficulties of the early years, maybe he only used his own head, in any case he dawned very quickly that he could not get any closer to art in this way.

The whole company studies ended with a departure without a degree and the conviction of Meeses that as an artist you have to be given the opportunity to criticize the system.

His success was no longer to be stopped, several insiders and experts in his area had now discovered Meese as an extraordinary talent. As early as the winter of 1996, he can take part in the exhibition project "Glock screams to Deutz" , a community work of over 40 artists, organized by the artist Cosima by Bonin and Daniel Buchholz from the gallery of the same name in Cologne.

In 1997 his first solo exhibition followed at the Kunstverein Kehdingen, then the order for the stage sets of Leander Haußmann's film Sonnenallee came. At the suggestion of Daniel Richter in 1998, the gallery owner Nicole Hackert and Bruno Brunnet from the Berlin gallery "Contemporary Fine Arts" into contact and under contract, CFA is still his gallery today.

Meese now also attracts international attention, in 1998 at the Berlin Biennale and in the same year at exhibitions in important European art cities, from the turn of the millennium, international exhibitions and from 2004 Theater work, Meese is one of the most important artists in the world for the first time.

In addition to an incessantly ongoing series of exhibitions, Meese also worked with colleagues more often, in 2006 in the work cycle "The whip of memory" with Daniel Richter, 2009 for "Meat is toughter than steel" with Herbert Volkmann, also with Tim Berresheim, the composer Karlheinz Essl, Jörg Immendorff, Albert Oehlen and the Danish artist Tal R.

In the meantime, his work has been bought by important museums and public collections for contemporary art, e.g. B. the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach, the Frankfurter Städel Museum, the Bonn collection of contemporary art in the Federal Republic of Germany and the Parisian Center Pompidou secured their share of Mesees's work, and in private collections of modern art, a MeeSE work is also welcome. B. in the Falckenberg Collection, in the English Saatchi Gallery and in the Essl Collection in Austria, the Berlin CFA is also no longer a only gallery.

Since then, Meese has always been talking to himself in public and is constantly connoted by the press, sometimes as an artist of the total riot and sometimes as a child prodigy. His work and statements to do so leave all forms of approaching ...

So you can choose to dismiss his art as an immature spinning mill and his statements as a provocative propaganda scream, as many real or supposed art connoisseurs do. However, they could also take a closer look and enjoy the Meesian perspective of things and its uninfluenced and critical statements about the commercial art business, how many independent minds do it.

When Meese, in a SPIEGEL interview at the University of Kassel, speaks of “self-perverted types” and “self-perverted diarrhea,” the documenta-weary lateral thinker is reminiscent of the clever line from Sophie Hunger’s song “Das Neue,” according to which “30 is the new 20, the man is the new woman, Germany is the new Turkey, non-smokers are the new smokers.”

Of course, you can also adhere to the quite a few sizes in the art, from which Jonathan Meese is very popular and quickly secure one of his work as an investment.

In this case, it seems to be a matter of approaching whether dealing with the biography will actually lead to a better understanding of art.

After all, the art market for unadjusted and not embedded newcomers has now become so small that little streamlined art is refreshment, and we should certainly all make sure that art can also develop not only at the art university with strict attention to the common teaching, but that there is still room for gifted outsiders.

In 2016, Meese will staged the Opera Parsifal by Richard Wagner at the 105th Bayreuth Festival , then we can finally not only deal with the art of Meeses, but also once again, whether Wagner - especially in Mees's artistic interpretation - really belongs to Germany.

One thing is quite likely: the more you deal with Meese, the more questions will arise. Isn't that exactly one of the most important meaning of art?

Exciting video series to the controversial artist Meese:

An ant of art