Artists

Jonas Höschl

Press release

Jonas Höschl is a conceptual artist and photographer. For his artistic work, which includes the media of printmaking, sound, video, and installation, he has received several awards, including the Bavarian Art Promotion Award for Visual Arts and the Cultural Prize of the Upper Palatinate District for printmaking. His most recent publications include the art books „Fade Away Medley"(Das Wetter) and „Politik von Medienbildern" (Hatje Cantz). His new book „80 Portraits: 73 Männer, 7 Frauen" will be released soon by the Verlag für moderne Kunst. In his printmaking and video works, he questions the identity-forming potential of political systems. Using regional political scandals and European conflicts as examples, he illustrates the alienation from unifying ideals. Jonas Höschl adopts the sometimes-historical visual languages of ideologies with different orientations to expose propagandistic manipulation. Through recontextualization, he highlights the referentiality of time documents.

It is a strength of his artistic works that they raise these questions rather than trying to answer them with supposed facticity and authenticity. Höschl is not so much trying to provide a clear reading of media representations, on the one hand, and of his own installations, on the other. In the tradition of aesthetic self-will, their immanent openness of meaning and complexity makes it possible to question what is shown and hence also the necessary discourse surrounding it. It is this ambivalence that distinguishes Höschl's works from an explicit engagement that declares implicit agreement with existing conditions.