JONNY NIESCHE

Niesche’s practice draws widely for its influences, including formal elements from twentieth-century art and the shiny allure of popular culture. He has exhibited a series of articulated screens filled with tonal gradients taken from the cover David Bowie’s album Aladdin Sane. The shades of Debbie Harry’s 1970s make-up have also entered his work, Niesche combining the best of disco’s theatrical, decadent aesthetic with a detached minimalism. These reductive forms that vibrate with the energy of vivid colour are often set against metal and mirror, offering shifting, alluring experiences of form, space, and movement. Materially fetishistic, glitter, mirror, translucent custom-dyed fabrics, and steel combine to offer a glamorous urban beauty. Recent exhibitions have seen Niesche produce art works of multiple panels that stretch up the gallery wall. Beginning intense and moving progressively through lighter tints, the multi-panelled paintings become wall-based 3-dimensional forms. Soft mint greens join other works where gradients of neon pastels—electrically charged turquoise blues fading into striking fuchsias—conjure up Miami sunsets, cocktails, and carefree tropical warmth.

In 2018 a monograph titled Jonny Niesche Cracked Actor Works 2013-2015 with texts by Martin Herbert, Kristina Marberger, and Nadim Samman was published by Verlag Für Moderne Kunst, Vienna.

Courtesy Starkwhite