Christian Jankowski

Christian Jankowski (b.1968, Göttingen, West Germany) is a renowned contemporary multimedia artist.  His conceptual artworks make use of film, video, photography and performance, but also of painting, sculpture, and installation. He  studied at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg, in Germany and lives and works in Berlin.

Jankowski’s work consists of performative interactions between himself with non-art professionals, between contemporary art and the so-called ‘world outside of art’. These interactions give insight into the popular understanding of art, while incorporating many of contemporary art’s leading interests in contemporary society: regarding lifestyle, psychology, rituals and celebrations, self-perception, competition, and mass-produced and luxury commodities. Over time, Jankowski has collaborated with magicians, politicians, news anchors, and members of the Vatican, to name just a few. In each case, the context for the interaction and the participants are given a degree of control over how Jankowski’s work develops and the final form that it takes. Jankowski documents these performative collaborations using the mass media formats that are native to the contexts in which he stages his work–film, photography, television, print media–which lends his work its populist appeal. Jankowski’s work can be seen both as a reflection, deconstruction, and critique of a society of spectacle and at the same time as reflection, deconstruction, and critique of art, which has given itself over to spectacle and thereby endangered its critical potential.

His videos, films, and installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally in places such as Fluentum, Berlin (2020); Fondazione del Monte, Bologna, IT (2018); Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama, JP (2017); HAL, Berlin (2016); the K21, Stiftung Kunstsammlung, Düsseldorf (2015); The Progetti per l’arte, Florence, IT (2015), The Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City (2014); The Pavilion Downtown Dubai (2013); Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros, Mexico City (2012); MACRO, Rome (2012); Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, DE (2009); Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, DE (2008); Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL (2007); and MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge, MA (2005).

Jankowski's work has been collected by major museums and institutions worldwide, including the following: Carnegie Museum of Art, Falkenberg Collection, Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, Hauser & Wirth Collection, Hamburger Kunsthalle, ICA Collection, Julia Stoschek Collection, Jerry I. Speyer Collection, Kunsthaus Zürich Collection, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Kadist Collection, Migros Museum Collection, Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig, Museo Jumex Collection, MUSAC Collection, M+ Collection, Neue Nationalgalerie, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, San Fransisco MOMA, Tate, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, The MET Collection I Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, Yokohama Museum of Art Collection, Japan

He has participated in numerous Biennials, including the 48th Venice Biennial in 1999, the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 2002 and the Taipei and Sydney Biennials in 2010. In addition, Jankowski curated Manifesta 11, Zurich, CH (2016).

Jankowski is a recipient of the Heitland Foundation Award (2013) and the Finkenwerder Art Prize (2015). Since 2006, he has held a sculpture professorship at the State Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart.

ARTIST'S INSTAGRAM