Neue Malerei

A conceptual inversion of the painting catalog by the German artist Christian Jankowski (b. 1968), Neue Malerei ("new painting") presents oil canvases of works by Picasso, Richter, Warhol, Dürer, and other icons of art history, painted by an artist who, by his own admission, cannot paint at all.

Jankowski collected photographs of tableaux vivants found on the internet (people restaging famous paintings) and sent them to his studio in Shenzhen, where Chinese copy painters rendered them in oil on canvas. The catalog, published for his March 2018 exhibition at the Berlin auction house Grisebach, plays the result straight, in linen-bound quarto with texts by Markus Bertsch, Simon Elson, and Florian Illies. As Illies writes, "Nothing is right on the (following) pages of this catalog. Everything is shaking — the optics, the habits of seeing, the certainties, the standards of quality." It is a book of new painting in which we only see works of old masters. In German distributed by Walther König.

Jankowski works in video, performance, and installation built on collaborations with non-art professionals (TV fortune tellers, magicians, weightlifters), probing how art passes through mass media. He curated Manifesta 11 in Zurich (2016), teaches at the Stuttgart Academy, and is represented by Petzel Gallery, New York.