MORITZ SCHLEIME
TEXTS (SELECTION)
Painters Corner
September 14–November 2, 2019 | Jarmuschek + Partner
The artist looks out of his corner, stands on his familiar position and understands the world from the window of his perspective. From this point everything is double-faced, there are no one-sided truths: Each statement meets its opposite. In Moritz Schleime's works, the paralyzing resignation of a lonely person meets the accelerated loudness of vibrant masses, a dreary colorlessness with exuberant festivity, posthuman monster creatures with human emotions.
The form of his expression is also closely linked to this system of ambivalence: His style cannot be assigned to either Expressionism or Surrealism, nor to Dada or Realism. Schleime's pictorial language rather plays by its own rules; its only constant is transformation in its instability and youthful insecurity.
The permanent movement and dynamics in his works allow us to pass through spaces and perceive them in the process of change: In front of us grapes the provocative, impersonal distance between the identity-seeking protagonists. We look at the apparent contradiction between civilization and wilderness, between culture and nature. The fields of tension of space and time between life and decay, ecstasy and degeneration, birth and destruction are superimposed.
Schleime's rebellious disrespect for traditional styles and conventional categories is evident in his infiltration of the masses' enthusiastic American-Western pop culture. Icons like Michael Jackson are symbols of an over-stimulated, masked and anxious generation in its assimilated and never-ending adolescence. A poisonous mixture of the unprotected interior of the media-soaked private sphere and the personal presentation in the social environment, the social exterior.
His art is not pleasing. It is attention-grabbing, rousing, aggressive. It can do a lot, but not one thing: leave the viewer untouched in his corner.
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The Virgin Suicides
September 17–October 15, 2016 | Jarmuschek+Partner
Moritz Schleime paints our world as a universe of antagonisms, in which loud and noisy tones are always close to subtle emotions and tender feelings of joy.
In his pictures, inflammatory and explosive power, social criticism and dreamlike absurdities can be found as well as romance, hope, ecstatic conditions, self-destructive aggression and abyssal disillusions – often combined with a large amount of black humour.
The artist presents his latest works under the title „The Virgin Suicides“. Ignorance, unfeelingness, tristesse and a lack of perspective mean not only the downfall for the protagonists in Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel of the same name, but have always been those abysses, in which the figures of Moritz Schleime’s paintings are gazing into. Right there the vulnerability of our social fabric is to be found: in the lack of mutual responsibility and understanding.
Thus, the personification of search for meaning and suppression seems to be lying on a car roof and to sober up in an idyllic setting of expressive colour. „Hangover, best friend“. How noisy can an empty beach be? Rebellion, exuberance and anti-culture have not left Moritz Schleime’s characters so far, but now they are joined by those with ties, pipes and hats. Conventionality, ladylikeness and business chic are confronting the beholder as well as Hollywood appearances and countryside idylls, leading him into a mask-like, shimmering world of adulthood, midway through glamorous individuality, feelings of safety, dropouts, forsakenness and melancholic loneliness. Thereby, sophisticated living rooms with designer furniture, romantic encounters on a forest glade and mysterious portraits remain always ambivalent and let our thoughts run free. Oscillating between civilisation and wildness, fragility and roughness, vitality and morbidity, it’s left to the onlooker to state his position on the perceived - along with his world view.
Moritz Schleime uses the pictorial language of different styles of art history and creates an own one out of them, that combines equally Surrealism, Expressionism, Dada and Realism. Close to the present age, he already gives us an idea of how the ambivalent sentiment of our era will be classified in the future: A chronicler of the chronically unstable.