Thoughts That Cure Radically: Sergej Jensen at Anton Kern

Utility is inverted in Danish born, Berlin based Sergej Jensen’s art. Stitched, stained, distressed and creased, Sergej Jensen dispels such forcefully inelegant verbs as ‘painted’. Following his one-person survey at PS1 last winter, Sergej Jensen exhibits new examples of his physically reduced, hushed, elegant and nearly monochromatic paintings at Anton Kern. Sparsely applied oil, acrylic and pastel catches each surface—cotton, jute, canvas and linen—unawares. Vulnerable but without falling into preciousness, Jensen’s work quietly polemicizes present-ness as a state for contemporary painting. Jensen’s inverted utility partakes of the same impulses that animated the work Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Joseph Albers and László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus artist’s notions of utility expanded outward. Writing in the introduction to ‘Bauhaus: Workshop of Modernity’ Leah Dickerman writes:

The autonomy of the discrete easel picture was challenged from the school’s first years. Over the span of the institution’s life, painting became an element of a fully designed environment, in a modernization of an Arts and Crafts model; its ambitions were appropriated by a large-scale textile wall hanging; it was reconceived as a wall painting, inescapable from the architecture space it defined; and it was dematerialized into mechanically produced light displays.

Jensen re-appropriates the Bauhaus version of utility. His large scale textile wall hangings, inescapable from their defined space, also happen to double as a traditional easel painting. Unlike the Bauhaus artists, who aimed to take the aesthetic and return it out into the world, Jensen consumes ready-made materials. Bedding sheets, scraps of fabric, needle and thread becomes the furniture of his world. By minimizing traditional art material and stepping beyond mere collage, Jensen instead creates a conceptual, abject version of the gesamtkunstwerk. The entirety of the artwork resides not in its creation of a world, but instead its reformation from the world.