biography
Jonas Hohnke born *1983 and grew up in Germany. He studied Fine Arts in the sculpture class of Ayse Erkmen and Guillaume Bijl (masterclass) at the Academy of fine Arts in Muenster (GER) and with Heimo Zobernig at the Academy of fine Arts in Vienna (AT). Since 2015 Jonas Hohnke works as an Artist mostly in the field of conceptual / minimal and object art.
He had institutional solo- and group exhibitions in Germany and abroad. He had scholarships and Artist Residencies at the Cité International des Arts in Paris (FR) or the Artist Residency at Schloss Ringenberg in Germany. In 2022 Jonas Hohnke won the International Bergisch Art Award.
Since 2023 he is teaching Arts and Design at the University of Applied Science Niederrhein (GER).
The works of Jonas Hohnke are in constant Museum collections, such as the Kunsthaus NRW Kornelimuenster in Aachen, the Museum of Art Goch and the Museum of Art Solingen. Jonas Hohnke lives and works in Germany.
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Prof. Dr. Beate Reifenscheid | Ludwigmuseum Koblenz | Catalogue text ‚aequilibrium vivat‘ | 2019
Jonas Hohnke apparently feels an urge to go to different places, where he deals with the local circumstances and in – corporates different moments of everyday life in his work process. The everyday and the supposedly inconspicuous are just as much welcome moments as are architectural circumstances, whose banality makes for their invisibility in everyday life, but which Jonas Hohnke, in an ironic manner, moves into the viewing horizon of a – usually rather spoiled – art community. In the process, works are created that for their part absorb and visualise moments of positioning and time. This includes several objects in which he merges the work and its surroundings, so that unrecognizability and visibility only gradually emerge in the course of viewing. For example, in the banal situation between floor and wall, which he photographs in situ and has then printed on canvas in order to finally position the canvases exactly where they were photographed before. In turn, the viewer experiences the irritation that seeks to relate the artefact to reality. At first, one might think, nothing new is created here, the situation itself seems too ordinary to even pay attention to. Wall corners, walls, stone slabs, concrete floors – all this does not speak of high architectural, let alone aesthetic relevance. In fact, the use, the usefulness, the function of use is expressed in all these motifs. Grey in grey, with few white nuances – one could almost get the impression that Jonas Hohnke’s world is a drab
monotony. Instead, however, on closer inspection one will notice that here perception is treated very subtly, and that some of these works, as in mimicry, almost completely assimilate with the real circumstances. Image and reality merge at the level of perception for a few seconds, only to drift apart again. The image becomes necessary in order to consciously perceive reality as such.
This also involves the very moment that is associated with the postioning itself which doesn‘t only apply to the floor works, but also to the prints he created and framed, on which a water level can be seen, remaining straight even when the frame is tilted. Here, too, the constant is the straight line,
which can be read like the horizon. Dr. Philipp Horst notes on Hohnke’s works in a plausible way:
“His works also deal with our subjective access to our everyday life – how do we perceive our environment? The content related, artistic meaning of his works lies both in the object itself, as well as in the context of its use. Both aspects charge the seemingly trivial everyday item, semantically and aesthetically. The water levels are arranged evenly, the frames, however, pop out of the horizontal plane.”
In a particularly elaborate manner, Jonas Hohnke designed “postcard stands”, in which he exhibited various motifs he had produced himself, the meaningfulness of which was only revealed when they were (and remained) positioned exactly at the point
from which the photographic angle for the postcards had been chosen. In this sophisticated process it is precisely here that the artist’s approach virtually shows itself: he does not get involved with the spontaneous or the momentary, but meticulously and painstakingly simulates the situation and produces it in equal measure. Thus, the viewer could, again similar to mimicry, recognize the view of the spatial situation, now sequenced to the format of individual postcards. The image becomes a representative of the spatial situation – also depending on the day – which the viewer experiences both as reality and as a partial image of it. Once again, the doubling of perception succeeds, the sharpening of the view of nuances, of the present, of time and its power of appearance.
None of the works imposes itself; rather, they continue to be surrounded by the aspect of the seemingly random, of the object carelessly positioned there. It is precisely in this, however, that Jonas Hohnke proves to be a subtle, very attentive biographer of the time, in which the sensory overload of the media seems to increasingly negate seeing and perceiving as such. The more the world finds its way into the small format of smartphones, the more it participates in the global events, the more it loses sight of the particular, of reality itself. Time and
space also play a different role there, blurring, as it were, with the virtuality of the cyber worlds.
Prof. Dr. Beate Reifenscheid | Ludwigmuseum Koblenz | Catalogue text ‚aequilibrium vivat‘ | 2019