Artists

Willem de Kooning

Press release

Opening on May 15, You Have to Change to Stay the Same: De Kooning // Minimum-intensity projection: Schröder, presented at Jahn und Jahn, Munich, during VARIOUS OTHERS, brings together works on paper by Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning and recent paintings by Düsseldorf-based Jana Schröder across the gallery's two spaces on Baaderstraße. The exhibition places two materially attentive practices in conversation for the first time. Despite the distance between them, both artists move through a similar pictorial terrain: bodies loosen into gesture, gesture thickens into paint, and forms drift between figuration and abstraction. Figures and their surroundings refuse to settle. Instead, they slip and reorganise themselves across the surface, as both artists use the pencil and paint to calibrate their mark-making. Centred on works produced between 1966 and the early 1970s, the presentation focuses on a turning point in de Kooning's life. Leaving behind the spit-and-sawdust energy of Manhattan, he spent increasing stretches of time in East Hampton, where the low horizon, changing weather, and coastal light filtered into his work. The drawings and works on paper from these years belong to a period of renewed experimentation. For de Kooning, paper was never secondary to painting but part of the daily rhythm of the studio. He drew on it, brushed colour across it, and pressed it into wet passages of paint, allowing the surface to absorb and resist in equal measure. Thin sheets – often inexpensive newsprint that sometimes reappeared in his canvases as collage – left little room for hesitation and demanded speed. On vellum or heavier wove papers the tempo slowed: marks could be wiped away, reconsidered, returned to. Jana Schröder's recent paintings meet these works with a distinctly contemporary intensity. In the large-scale canvases of her series VISCERAFFIC (2024), bodies seem to unfold rather than simply appear. Limbs extend beyond plausible anatomy; torsos open into luminous cavities; fragments of organs or bone drift to the surface before dissolving again into colour. The figure never stabilises. It stretches across the canvas or folds back into itself, entangled with surrounding forms that press inward from the edges of the composition. Paint behaves like a living material – pooling, staining, smearing, and slipping across the ground – while lines thread through the surface like pathways of transmission. The title VISCERAFFIC merges visceral with traffic, evoking both the body's interior systems and the circulation of signals through contemporary digital networks.