21 x 29 cm, Mixed-Media on paper, 2023
Jonathan Meese (b.1970, Tokyo) is a German painter, sculptor, performance artist, and installation artist based in Berlin and Hamburg.
Throughout his anarchic, wide-ranging practice, Jonathan Meese creates an expansive personal mythology featuring characters inspired by history, legend, and science fiction. Meese has worked across painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, stage design, and writing, among other media, and explores revolution, ideology, and what the artist calls the “dictatorship of art.” He has interpolated such figures as Joseph Stalin, Richard Wagner, and John Wayne via raw, chaotic brushworks and confrontational performances. Meese has exhibited in New York, Paris, Berlin, London, Vienna, and Los Angeles. His work has sold for six figures on the secondary market and belongs in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Essl Museum, Saatchi Gallery, the Rubell Museum, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and the S.M.A.K. Museum of Contemporary Art.
