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Jan-Ole Schiemann

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  • Biography
    View works. Jan-Ole Schiemann, Insectoid, 2023
    Insectoid, 2023
    View works
    Born in Kiel, Germany 1983
    Lives & Works in Cologne, Germany
    Download Artist CV (PDF, opens in a new tab.)
  • "Schiemann’s forms take on a life of their own and shamelessly present themselves to our gaze. They mischievously touch each other by means of motival tricks like fingers and hands, noses, and other organic forms." —Philipp do Brito
  • Cologne-based artist Jan-Ole Schiemann expands and challenges abstract painting traditions through a process of mark-making, constructing images that are simultaneously...
    Jan-Ole Schiemann in his Cologne studio. Photography by Mareika Tocha, 2023.
    Cologne-based artist Jan-Ole Schiemann expands and challenges abstract painting traditions through a process of mark-making, constructing images that are simultaneously sophisticated and playful. With a practice steeped in gesturalism, lyrical abstraction, and the history of twentieth-century animation, Schiemann’s large-scale paintings and works on paper burst into frenetic clarity, kindling a dialectical query between process and image, paint and surface, and the spatial divisions produced therein.

    Conscious of their own format, Schiemann’s large-scale paintings take formal cues from materials readily found in his studio, from handmade stencils to wooden supports. First guided by the rectilinear picture plane, Schiemann begins his compositions by outlining the rigid shapes of those materials before marking his canvas with sweeping gestures in acrylic, oil stick, ink, and charcoal. The exterior edges of Schiemann’s hollow stencils lend to vertical bands of color that assert themselves in several compositions, while the interior edges echo the forms of musical symbols. In these potent loci, where automatism meets an ensuing game of decision-making, color, line, and shape make phenomenological demands that encourage their viewers’ active awareness to discern their internal logic.
  • Schiemann cites color as an element worthy of concentration away from the edges of his canvas, distinct from the dense architectures of his earliest series. Populated by distantly familiar elements—hands, petals, or piano keys appear and dissolve into fields of color and raw canvas—Schiemann’s cultivated configurations streamline the signature forms of his earlier works, filled with latent references waiting to be elucidated. Hands, a notable motif among Schiemann’s paintings, reference their own manual production amid their carefully abstracted environs, caught in an impasse where codes of artistic labor and an exhaustive schema of “either-or” converge in an existential dilemma. In Schiemann’s paintings, these forms—adapted from a previously-developed vocabulary, once realized through projections of collaged materials mined from a myriad of sources including vintage comics, the early animations of Max Fleischer, and Schiemann’s own meticulous works on paper—reappear as fragments of their former selves.

    Schiemann’s formal vocabulary, and especially his use of stencils, impart a distinctly singular visual language that critic Estelle Hoy has likened to “visual scatting,” or amalgamations of fervor that art historian and writer Philipp Fernandes do Brito has compared to musical sampling. An ardent electronic musician himself, and one who often listens to music while working in his studio, Schiemann’s aesthetic influences extend to avant-garde jazz figures like Sun Ra, blending seamlessly with his celebrated “remixing” of his own visual lexicon and the painterly devices of his predecessors like Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell.
  • Schiemann’s works on paper equally evince his technical prowess as a draftsman. Realized in ink, these works mirror the process-based...
    Schiemann’s works on paper equally evince his technical prowess as a draftsman. Realized in ink, these works mirror the process-based facture of the artist’s large-scale canvas paintings: Schiemann begins by creating a quadrate frame in which he simulates sweeping gestures to build comparably sophisticated and exuberant works.

    Born in Kiel, Germany, in 1983, Schiemann graduated from the renowned Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2013, where he studied under Albert Oehlen and Andreas Schulze. Having staged important solo and group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Marfa, Brussels, Seoul, Antwerp, and across Germany, Schiemann will mount a solo exhibition at the esteemed Neue Galerie Gladbeck in Gladbeck, Germany in November 2023. In 2022, he unveiled a site-specific wall installation at the Kunst-Station in Wolfsburg’s Central Station, and from 2021 until 2022 he co-operated an artist-run exhibition space called “mauer” in Cologne’s Roman city wall. His first solo exhibition with Kasmin went on view in 2019, debuting his lauded Kavex series. Schiemann’s work can be found in numerous prominent collections, including the Bronx Museum, New York and the Rubell Museum, Miami, among others.
  • Works
    • Jan-Ole Schiemann, Insectoid, 2023
      Insectoid, 2023
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    • Jan-Ole Schiemann, o.T., 2023
      o.T., 2023
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    • Jan-Ole Schiemann, Ring, 2022
      Ring, 2022
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    • Jan-Ole Schiemann, Untitled, 2022
      Untitled, 2022
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    • Jan-Ole Schiemann, Kavex 18, 2019
      Kavex 18, 2019
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    • Jan-Ole Schiemann, Vielgestalt im Zwischenreich, 2019
      Vielgestalt im Zwischenreich, 2019
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  • Exhibitions
    • Jan-Ole Schiemann: If there was a letter for it

      Jan-Ole Schiemann: If there was a letter for it

      October 1 – 25, 2024 514 West 28th Street, New York
      Kasmin presents Cologne-based painter Jan-Ole Schiemann’s (b. 1983) third solo presentation at the gallery, If There Was A Letter For It. On view will be new canvas paintings that index a careful process of gestural mark making, featuring Schiemann’s first series of paintings to incorporate oil paint. With oil, Schiemann intensifies the expression of velocity within his work, capturing a range of motion in thick gestural marks that glide across the canvas in assertive colorways. Returning to the grid as a guiding compositional strategy, Schiemann imparts a distinct geometric character in these paintings, expanding his singular visual vocabulary.
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    • Jan-Ole Schiemann: New Paintings

      Jan-Ole Schiemann: New Paintings

      April 27 – June 3, 2023 509 West 27th Street, New York
      Schiemann’s energetic constructions are characterized by boldly abstract figures, vivid cumulous color clouds, and an assertive, instinctive use of shape and line. The artist’s most recent compositions meld fragments and echoes from his former visual vocabulary with new devices that together push the language of gestural abstraction into new territories.
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    • Jan-Ole Schiemann: A Different Pose

      Jan-Ole Schiemann: A Different Pose

      March 7 – May 4, 2019 297 Tenth Avenue, New York
      Kasmin is pleased to present A Different Pose, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of new paintings by Cologne-based artist Jan-Ole Schiemann. Schiemann’s paintings are grounded in both gestural abstraction and the history of 20th-century animation, aspects that combine to imbue his work with a rare sense of kinetic energy. Half-formed, simultaneously disappearing and reappearing shapes suggest that somewhere amidst the lines, there are figures tumbling, colliding, or fighting obscured by clouds of smoke. As a result of Schiemann’s meticulous, layered application of charcoal, oilstick, ink and acrylic, the works have the illusion of both a sculptural and a digital depth. The artist’s first solo exhibition at Kasmin will be comprised of new medium-scale and monumental paintings, as well as the debut of a new series of works on paper.
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  • News
    • Jan-Ole Schiemann reviewed in Brooklyn Rail

      Jan-Ole Schiemann reviewed in Brooklyn Rail

      by Andrew Woolbright May 24, 2023 View More
    • USA For UNHCR

      USA For UNHCR

      Art And Resilience Benefit Auction April 29, 2021 View More
    • Jan-Ole Schiemann reviewed in Art Observed

      Jan-Ole Schiemann reviewed in Art Observed

      by C. Reinhart March 22, 2019
      Now on view at New York space Kasmin Gallery, artist Cologne-based artist Jan-Ole Schiemann is mounting a debut solo exhibition, bringing with him a collection...
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509 West 27th Street

New York
Tuesday–Saturday, 10am–6pm
+1 212 563 4474
info@kasmingallery.com

 

297 Tenth Avenue

New York
Tuesday–Saturday, 10am–6pm
+1 212 563 4474
info@kasmingallery.com

 

Kasmin Sculpture Garden

New York
On view from The High Line at 27th Street
Monday–Sunday, 7am-11pm
+1 212 563 4474
info@kasmingallery.com

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