Jonny Star - The Cycle Room

Life is made up of cycles, and Jonny Star’s is no exception. The creative work of this Berlin-based artist communicates her worldly perambulations. The solo exhibition The Cycle Room is intended not as a retrospective but as a well-rounded insight into her twenty-year practice in the production of collage, painting, bronzes and textile objects. Star has been creating sculptures, canvases, works on paper and textile-based pieces since 1996. Her work investigates the relationship between art and the everyday, human and animal, man and woman, the id and the ego. It engenders a timeless world of appearances. She uses vintage textiles or reissued patterns from the sixties and seventies. Printed fabrics featuring circles or flowers are incorporated into collages, repurposed as cushion sculptures, sewn, embroidered, scanned, reprinted, even imitated in paint. The series Jonny Dancing (2011) – the first use of her alias Jonny Star – consists of a number of photographic self-portraits in which the artist finds imaginative and humorous uses for an old-fashioned pair of knickers. Fine craftsmanship and textile-based photography lend materiality to the central issues of gender and identity.

Sculptural works from 1998 and 1999, presented here as new editions in patinated bronze, seem androgynous, animal and human, like the creatures of an unwritten mythology. In the series of bronzes from 2016 Star consciously references herself with titles such as Me Born, Me Staring at My Breasts and Me Gone; poetic evocations of the life cycle and the passage from birth to death. Some of these works take the form of animals such as the hare. This creature in particular is a recurring theme in Star’s work and also appears here in the works on paper and canvas. It stands for fertility, attentiveness and observation. Each sculpture in the Me series features the cup of an acorn, one of Mother Nature’s circular forms. This natural cup and the rest of the acorn constitute another fertility symbol, though it also stands for life, immortality and, beyond that, androgyny. But as art historian Eva Meyer-Hermann writes in her text accompanying the exhibition: ‘As “Points of Spiritual Transformation" (J. S.), these forms do not so much indicate sex and individuality as a perpetual cycle of which we are a part. They are small, round breakpoints which remind us of the fact that the circle as geometric form is not only identical to the gender symbols for man and woman, but likewise part of the signs for Venus and Mars. Jonny Star’s The Cycle Room can thus be said to be far more than a self-portrait or a simple description of man or woman; rather it is a cyclic-fluent process that would situate and justify one’s own existence in the space of society and politics.’

Jonny Star creates a world. With craft and magic. And this alongside her artistic practice, the group exhibitions she curates and the regular studio visits she puts on, her way of creatively bringing people together. ‘Her artistic concept is to turn everything into art – things, situations and actions alike’ (Eva Meyer-Hermann, ‘Art as Foodstuff’ in Jonny Star, See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me, Distanz, 2016).

Kontakt / Contact:
assistant@jonny-star.com
info@katharinamariaraab.com
 
www.jonny-star.com
www.katharinamariaraab.com

Opening Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, 4 pm – 6 pm
Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, 1 pm – 6 pm
Berlin Art Week – Friday 15 September 2017 1 pm – 9 pm
Saturday, 9 September, 2017 to Saturday, 30 September, 2017