JENS KAEUMLE

Icons

Do we look at injustice and, perhaps unconsciously, assume that someone else will take responsibility?

German-born, U.S.-based artist Jens Kaeumle presents art works meditating on the manifestos and meanings of universal truths, dialectics, and history. Across the presented multi-media paintings, Kaeumle uses familiar tools to skewer timeworn tropes, to turn established meaning into unrealized potential, to explore the power of difference through the thesis of identity.

Each of these works is grounded in the uncanny, yet each elicits a visceral response. Idea made form; emotion become action. Everything exists: something mystical; something dangerous; something foreboding, but strangely familiar.

To comprehend this duality more fully, consider the art works Kaeumle shares here. In an instant, the true sense of “if you know, you know” is revealed. Kaeumle’s works glide against the elisions between sacred and profane. On one canvas, a long, white wig hangs like a golden fleece, pushing its way into space, while in the background an exploration of victory and celebration reveals how mundane, how predictable, how ungrounded these experiences may seem. At the same time, a more concrete allusion to heroism emerges in three medals pinned to the work’s surface, symbols for and symptoms of a sense of duty. The historical? An honorific statue, frozen in time. The contemporary? A suggestion that some form of truth, some reality, is within reach.

Throughout these works, and others, Kaumle challenges stereotypes and presuppositions: the valor of nationalism and a commitment to service becomes a metaphor for vaingloriousness; the mundanity of the everyday becomes a celebration of intimacy, persistence, and commitment. Kaeumle challenges our assertions of identity – here, Americanness – by repositioning what it means to be saintly and celebrated. The woman on the back of the motorcycle is as much Springsteen’s saint in the city as she is an aspirational Black Madonna illustrating the beauty of the everyday. With her eyes closed and her gaze shifted down, she is as radiant as a Renaissance painting, but bound by the lived experience of black Americans.

In some sense, what Kaeumle does particularly subtly here is redefine opposition. His central questions become, “What does it mean to be and how do we define who is Other? The blackness of the riders against the whiteness of the Teutonic; the profanity of temptation against the godliness of service, of the mundane, of the everyday. The allure, the alchemy, the transformative power of gold, whether considered as an idea, used as a color, or valued and even coveted as a material. Ours is a time in which allegorical painting is altogether and all too often so enveloped in the story it is trying to convey that it ceases to stray very far from its pomposity. No nuance; no story, apart from the familiar; no resonance; no tone. But Kaeumle challenges us, again and again, to step away from a predisposition to know, and to instead imagine that there could be a deeper, more connective story in the unknown. In the words of RZA, “Oh, the flesh is weak, it's a struggle for peace /

It's a daily conflict between man and beast / We strive for God and a better tomorrow / Still suffering from the unforgettable sorrow.”

Born in Leonberg, Germany, Jens Kaeumle took art classes from an early age. His formal art education began at 18, when he enrolled at Hamburg Armgartstrasse, Fachhochschule für Gestaltung. He furthermore studied under the renowned painters Bettina Kresslein and Bernd Mack, as well as sculptor Max Schmitz. Kaeumle undertook an MFA at the Royal College of Art, London, where his creative explorations led from painting and sculpture to fashion and a persistent exploration of the human body. Initially primarily a painter and illustrator, over the course of his career Kaeumle has expanded his practice to include fashion, sculpture, mixed media collage, and time-based media. Having travelled and lived extensively across Europe and the United States, today Kaeumle lives and works between Savannah, Georgia, Stuttgart, Germany and Paris, France.

Text: Brett Levine

Artist

Jens Kaeumle