Jens Semjan

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jens Semjan 2010

Jens Semjan (born February 13, 1979 in Ulm ) is a conceptual artist, communication and media theorist .

life and work

Jens Semjan studied from 2001 to 2006 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and was a master student of Joseph Kosuth . He advocates a critical examination of public and municipal cultural funding. He justifies this with the tight budget situation and the priority of educational institutions such as schools and kindergartens over theaters and art museums. “Museums and theaters should also be given the opportunity to operate sustainably…” He sees the social importance of conceptual art solely in its educational mission and its educational value: “Information must be simple and generally understandable. This also applies to art. ”The artist lives in Brussels and Munich .

Semjan uses a wide variety of media to express the mostly political concepts: The screen prints on steel are exposed to the weather for months. Unprinted image areas corrode and create their own visual language. Numerous screen prints by the artist were on view in the Leipzig cotton spinning mill in 2009 . In 2007, he produced a large model of the Oval Office entirely from cardboard and paper. The 16 m² installation Park View Office to Let is also part of the Holland Paper Biennial 2010 in the CODA Museum, Apeldoorn , Holland.

The most recent museum exhibitions like That's all Folks! in the Stadshallen, Bruges, Belgium and The Grand Insolvency Show , which was created in cooperation with the journalist and PR consultant Bernhard Lermann in the Lothringer13 - Städtische Kunsthalle München as well as in the Stadthaus Ulm , received wide press coverage:

  • “With their playful catalog, Jens Semjan and Bernhard Lermann create something that cannot simply be ascribed to processed figures: amazement, then amazement and ultimately the loss of all security… The artists put arithmetic equatorial bands around the globe and at the same time demonstrate that statistics create emptiness. "( Die Welt , February 2010)
  • “Slowly but reliably, the slide projectors throw one statistic after the other onto the walls of the room. A world of images made up of clear geometric figures: circles, columns and lines. ”( Süddeutsche Zeitung , February 2010)
  • "In Ulm, statistics become works of art" ( DRS 2 , August 2010)
  • "... the first realization dawns after just a few minutes: There is nothing for which there are no statistics." ( SWR TV , August 2010, available on YouTube )
  • "Polemical, funny and completely unsolvable" ( Südwest Presse , August 2010)

Jens Semjan has received project funding from the Allianz Kulturstiftung , the Erwin-und-Gisela-von-Steiner-Stiftung and the Karin Abt-Straubinger Stiftung. His works are in numerous collections, including a. the art collection of Allianz SE and Alpine Bau Deutschland AG.

Entrepreneurial activity

Vitra Eames Lounge Chair
Jens Semjan on an Eames Lounge Chair in Utah

In 2015, Jens Semjan founded the trading company MidModern . The company sells furniture design classics of the 20th century as historical originals or licensed new productions, e.g. B. the Eames Lounge Chair . The company name comes from the English term mid-century modern , which describes an epoch of development in the 20th century in architecture and town planning, interior, product and graphic design between 1933 and 1965. As one of the few retailers worldwide, MidModern offers designer furniture from numerous world-famous brands outside of selective distribution systems , which has already brought public hostility to the company from furniture groups. As early as 2016, Jens Semjan criticized in a newspaper article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung the sometimes widespread price maintenance of manufacturers in the designer furniture trade.

Publications

  • Jens Semjan: Of Romantic Ideas and the Cruel Truth , LfA Förderbank Bayern, 2005
  • Ostrale'09 - International art exhibition for contemporary arts , Dresden, 2009
  • Michel Dewilde, Jerome Jacobs: That's all Folks! , City of Brugge, 2009
  • artenews - Arts En Belgique, Bruxelles , 2009
  • Holland Paper Biennale 2010 , Rijswij, 2010, ISBN 978-90-801242-6-4
  • Made! Done! , Berlin, 2015, ISBN 978-3-95763-241-8
  • 2050: A Brief History of the Future , Royal Museums of Fine Art Belgium, 2015, ISBN 9789461612540

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Florian Siebeck: Classic at a bargain price ". Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 15, 2016, accessed on September 20, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Semjan, Jens
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German conceptual artist, communication and media theorist
DATE OF BIRTH February 13, 1979
PLACE OF BIRTH Ulm