Opening on Wednesday, May 16, 6–9 pm. With contribution from Clemens Rathe

Libraries collect, organise and preserve books. The information contained therein is indexed, categorised and made accessible to the general public. While the concept of an analogue book repository may seem anachronistic to some in times of digitisation, library-specific topics – why what is collected in what form and how knowledge is processed – can be used as examples to raise questions about the context dependency of information.

In his painterly oeuvre, Andreas Breunig deals with the social and cultural origins of art as ways of generating and exchanging information. In his first solo exhibition PREDICTION / ANALYSIS (background) at Jahn und Jahn in Munich, the gallery's own library, which has been collected over decades and focuses on art after 1945 and works on paper, serves as a physical and intellectual background for his works.

The artist moved the entirety of the shelves, including all the books, into the exhibition space. The monumental, monochrome paintings created especially for the exhibition, with organic-looking white forms on a black background, form a kind of anthithesis to the pool of information – back to back with the teaching of recent and contemporary art history. The context dependency of art and the mantra of biographical information about artists are visually put to the test here. As an observing individual one is completely thrown back on oneself at the moment of visualisation and nevertheless confronted with the enormous abundance of articulated ideas against the backgound of universal knowledge. Thus, these images ferment as long as we ourselves are able to question our world of thoughts between familiarity and curiosity, to apply our knowledge and experience or to ignore it to allow new starting points again and again.

Breunig uses the empty space of the temporarily non-existent library in the basement of the gallery to question what happens when all contextualisation is lost. The gap in knowledge is filled by a series of drawings mounted as collages on wooden panels with posters, in which the artist reflects on his pop-cultural origins in the 1990s in an ambivalent tension with so-called high culture.

Andreas Breunig, born 1983 in Ebersbach, lives and works in Düsseldorf. 2002-2008 Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (with Albert Oehlen), since 2023 professor at Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts), Munich (interim professorship for painting and print). Selected exhibitions: 2023 Alfonso Artiaco Gallery, Naples (s); 2022 Jahn und Jahn, Munich; 2022 & 2021 Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Frankfurt/Main (s); Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles & Brussels (s); 2022 H2 Zentrum für Gegenwartskunst im Glaspalast, Augsburg; 2021 Kunsthaus NRW, Aachen-Kornelimünster, 2020 Kunstverein Heppenheim (s); 2020 Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Frankfurt /Main; 2020 Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Galerie Sabine Knust, Munich (s); 2019 Kunstmuseum Bonn; 2019 Kunstmuseum Wiesbaden; 2019 Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz; 2019 sauvage, Bonn (s); 2019 Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (s); 2018 Aishti Foundation, Beirut; 2018 Kunstverein Heppenheim (with Jana Schröder); 2018 Kunstverein Reutlingen; 2017 Warhus Rittershaus, Cologne (with Clemens Rathe); 2016 Fondazione Carriero, Milan; 2014 Haus der Kunst St. Josef, Solothurn, CH; 2012 Rauenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne; 2011 KIT – Kunst im Tunnel, Düsseldorf; 2008 Villa de Bank Eschede (s); 2008 Kunsthaus Sootbörn, Hamburg.

(s) solo shows