JAN ZÖLLER

Solo Exhibition:
Jan Zöller
Possibly there’s a possibility that everything is possible
Robert Grunenberg, in cooperation with Meyer Riegger
26.10.2019 – 21.12.2019

The Hygeia Fountain, built in 1905, is located a short distance from the city center; over the years its bronze basin has been tarnished by weather and smog. It is in general need of renovation and cuts a sad figure against the backdrop of the old Vierordtbad. While he was studying, Jan Zöller lived on a street near the Hygeia Fountain and would pass it on a daily basis – he could even see it from his balcony. Fountains were the subject of many of Zöller’s paintings following his graduation from the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, and the fountain forms a central motive in his first solo exhibition, Possibly there’s a possibility that everything is possible, at Meyer Riegger and Robert Grunenberg.

An abstract representation of the fountain appears throughout Zöller’s images, videos, and sculptural works – the archetypal form of a tiered fountain, which played a major social, economic, and cultural role in the history of communal life in the city. In his paintings, the fountain also brings together central themes: residential architecture, abstract human figures, birds, and fire. Using these elements as a starting point he creates settings, and scenes containing different protagonists in which he outlines the relationships and interdependencies between people and systems – interdependencies of emotions and social togetherness but also of economic cycles.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Roman Fountain comes to mind, a short poem in which the cycle of water in a fountain – flowing from one basin to the next to then returning to the top to cascade down again from above – comes to symbolize the relationship between giving and taking.

The paintings featured in the exhibition, as well as Zöller’s performative and sculptural work, all revolve around cycles: there is a circulation of water, tears, urine, blood, and wine; tobacco smoke courses, human and birdlike figures clamber over each other, loving, fighting against and using the other. Day and night, moon and sun, fire and water, movement and stasis alternate; creating dependencies, destroying and recreating one another.

In the triptych “Magical Fountain”, stick people – genderless figures consisting of legs, feet, and arms – throw coins into an opulent fountain, ponder life by night, and wait for the coins’ promises of happiness, only to take them out of the fountain again at the break of day.

Another image, “Sculpture running away from the Opening”, shows long-legged fountain figures running panic-stricken from the left- to the right-hand side of the painting while doing so sloshing red wine from the glasses of the opening. Zöller playfully allows the sculptures to break free from their role – is the exhibition opening or even the art world itself so terrible to cause one to run away from it? He unflinchingly reiterates and variegates individual motives in his work, happily inverting them and reducing accepted ideas of their meaning and classification to absurdity. In his stage-like landscapes, half-moons obtrude into the wedge-shaped spotlights of glowing celestial bodies, mask-like birds’ heads collectively draw on a cigarette that ramifies like the branches of a tree, its smoke rising eerily into a spectral S-shape in the sky