Sebastian Jung: It’s not about me
11.11.2016–22.12.2016
In his first exhibition at Sperling, Sebastian Jung presents photography, sculpture and works on paper dedicated to self-perception in the digital age. He combines found imagery extracted from popular social-media, such as Snapchat or Facebook, with everyday impressions and situations from his immediate surroundings captured by mobile phone and subsequently transfers these into their respective medium. Jung's interdisciplinary approach is primarily based on his subtle talent of perception and acts as the basis to his artistic work. Equipped with irony and relentless self-critique 'It's not about me' deals with the individuation 'profile' pressure inherent in social media and its resulting omnipresent staging of the desired self-image.
This deeply narcissistic act of permanently seeking recognition, which artists have always attributed to themselves and which is now widely accepted behavior, mirrors today's society. Only now the individual must find a way of positioning him or herself within it. What happens to a society where the individual solely revolves around itself? Where not 15 minutes but 15 seconds of fame is an ambition? Fear and desires are fueled. This, Jung unveils in an ironic stance, positioning himself at the centre of attention, not as a strong nor confident, but sensitive and vulnerable kind of individual. This is all obviously not just about Sebastian Jung, it is a more intense and reflected examination of society and its social norms and is an attempt at mirroring the view of the onlooker. The work is therefore at first glance light-hearted, but on closer inspection entails a healthy sense of melancholia.
For this exhibition, Jung approaches this topic from different perspectives and combines different media in a set of series. Delicate drawings dominated by starkly-reduced lines hang alongside expressive caricature-like watercolors. His photographs are fleeting mobile-phone photography, whose slightly blurred and optically-faulty aesthetic underlines the scurrility of the moment and the act in itself. Through the addition of emojis and short text-excerpts the mimicry of social-media communication becomes clearly visible.
Sebastian Jung, *1987, studied art and design at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. His work has recently been exhibited at the Kunstsammlung Jena, Kunstverein Jena, the nGbK (neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst ) in Berlin and at the Imaginata Jena. In 2017 the Munich Stadtmuseum will be showing works from the series 'Winzerla - Kunst als Spurensuche im Schatten der NSU', accompanied by a catalogue published by Kerber Verlag. Sebastian lives and works in Jena.