Kunsthalle Düsseldorf

In their first joint exhibition, artists Margarete Jakschik (b. 1974 in Ruda Slaska, PL) and Friedrich Kunath (b. 1974 in Chemnitz, GER), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is showing photographs, paintings and installations by the two artists. Here, their distinctive aesthetic positions, as much as their similarities, are brought into focus.

Margarete Jakschik works exclusively in photographs that deal with the poetry of the everyday. In their atmospheric colouring, they speak quietly and almost inaudibly of our relationships to past situations and the experiences found therein – in romantic tradition and current reflection.

In addition to painting, Friedrich Kunath's artistic work also includes sculptures, installations, photography, films and music and appears as a melancholic-humorous remix of elements of German Romanticism and contemporary pop-cultural history: East-West, life and death, pronounced melancholy and sadness meet exalted enthusiasm.

In the exhibition ONLY LOVERS LEFT, the Kunsthalle becomes a space of contemplation, reflection, longing and melancholy. The couple emigrated westward from the Rhineland to Los Angeles in 2007. Capturing journeys both inward and out, Jakschik and Kunath reckon with the legacy of German Romanticism, all the while unraveling its conceptual ironies and clichéd motifs of longing: solitary figures, picturesque sunsets and meandering paths can be found throughout their wistful compositions, combined with distinctly American imagery and continuous references to popular culture. In other words, the Romantic is brought firmly into the present. The result shifts between irony and sincerity, euphoria and melancholy. At their core, the familiar landscapes and everyday objects seem to harbour a longing for an irretrievable past, capturing the transience and timelessness of life with an attitude that is at once playful and poetic.

The age of Romanticism (1789 - 1848) also included freedom (and the struggle for freedom), which therefore not only influenced the arts, but also politics and education. Individual imagination, the sublime and the beauty of nature were discussed as new aesthetic categories – in this respect, the question is more topical than ever. And in a world under constant stress, message and content of the exhibition ONLY LOVERS LEFT are soothingly good, helping us to achieve a little calm and confidence, and in the best case a positive sense of togetherness.

The title ONLY LOVERS LEFT is a reference to Jim Jarmusch’s eponymous film Only Lovers Left Alive from 2013.

The exhibition is curated by Gregor Jansen and Alicia Holthausen in close collaboration with Margarete Jakschik and Friedrich Kunath.