Meliksetian | Briggs is pleased to present Seven Paintings and a Sculpture, an installation of new work by Cologne-based Johannes Wohnseifer for the 5th edition of the June Art Fair, Basel.

In the new exhibition, Wohnseifer continues his critique of culture, consumerism, and capitalism, repurposing, reusing and co-opting existing images, logos, corporate branding, and design strategies to frame autobiographical, historical, political, and in this presentation, emotional experience. In these works, Wohnseifer’s aesthetic and commentary finds expression via paradoxical technological processes - advanced, innovative, obsolete, failed, or repurposed.

This new series of paintings, the Dementia-paintings, began as a further development of my Screen-Series. The work in this series had a hybrid character and combined the analog activity of painting, with digital imagery which was generated in a subtractive production process.

The screen, the phone, the computer, the television, as a “window to the world“ seems already to be a form of constriction, and cognitive draining, by having too much screen time, is a common effect. To push this notion further, I tried to translate signs and symptoms of the state of dementia, like memory loss, confusion, repeated actions, getting lost or impulsive acting, into a painterly practice. Trying to transfer these symptoms, which are disasterous and have brutal consequences for the persons concerned and their relatives, into the field of painting, transformed them for me and made them bearable, at least on a theoretical level. But it is still difficult to speak about this, and is further complicated because I never intended to use painting as a therapeutic tool. Experiencing memory loss as a human being is tragic and painful, but emptying in a painting can be quite beautiful. Accepting these contradictions actually helped a lot and provided the imputus for the new work.

For the presentation at June Art Fair in Basel, these new works will be shown together with my first Polaroid-painting of 2023, and a tondo painting of the logo of a Swiss weapons manufacturer with the name “Unique“.