Bonn, January 2023: Art project: Gallery becomes soup kitchen

Helping is not an art – but art can help!

Just before Christmas, people like to share. Then the Christmas tree in their own home shines a little brighter.

But what happens after the holidays? In January and February, when winter strikes with full force, the days are short and the nights bitterly cold? People don't stop starving just because the glittering lights and candlelight have faded away.

Compassion and willingness to help must be guided by need, not by the calendar.

Helping is not an art – but art can help!

The artist Dennis Josef Meseg and his team will be serving 100 hot meals daily between 5:00 pm and approximately 8:00 pm from January 15th to February 9th, 2023, as part of an art event at the UPdate Gallery in Bonn, Breite Str. 85.

Free of charge, for people in need who want to eat their fill and feel welcome and safe. Just like all of us.

"What's for dinner?" is a question everyone knows and loves to ask because it brings such a good feeling. When everyone sits down at the table, anticipation spreads for a warm meal, for comfort, and the pleasant knowledge of once again being satisfied.

However, there are also tables where this question is asked in a slightly different form.

"Is there anything to eat today?"

"No,"is the answer there, and how bitter it must be to look into the hungry eyes of children. Into the faces of old people who have worked all their lives and yet receive only a meager pension.

Refugees, homeless people, welfare recipients, single mothers, victims of the flood disaster in the Ahr Valley – the list of those who do not get enough to eat in our country is long.

And the disastrous war, the exploding electricity and gas prices, and the ever-increasing cost of food are doing their part to exacerbate this situation.

Perhaps we can't help everyone. But we should try.

Because a little bit of luck for everyone is great luck for everyone.

The artist Dennis Josef Meseg

Dennis Josef Meseg discovered his love for art at a young age . His yearning for artistic freedom led him to leave his hometown early on.

At just 23 years old, he caused a sensation as the youngest painter in a group exhibition at the French Galerie du Haut-Pavé in Paris – at that time still under the pseudonym “John Christoph Dionysos Sommersberg”.

Left to his own devices, he accepted every job offered to earn a living, as he couldn't make a living from art alone. Ultimately, with a heavy heart, he decided to give up art and pursue a more conventional career as a media designer.

At 40 years old, he has now succeeded in realizing his dream as an artist.

Through his retrospective, with which he applied to the Alanus University in Alfter near Bonn in 2019, he was certified by two independent professors as having extraordinary artistic talent, which secured him admission to study art at the Alanus University.

He spontaneously decided to study sculpture, drawn by the abundance of material he encountered when visiting the sculpture studios of his fellow students. From the very beginning, the driving force behind his art was the attempt to make thoughts and feelings literally tangible, to find, recognize, and define himself.

Dennis Josef Meseg has remained true to this philosophy of life to this day:

"I let each record affect me using a special breathing technique in order to uncover its secret. Every feeling that permeated me, that was recognized as a special moment, was then documented in one or more cuts."

– Installation “A Thousand Moments | Bonn 2020”