Preface of the catalogue
Jan Albers - E. Kunz to Robben Island
Mönchehaus Museum for modern art Goslar (Germany)

(...)
In 1984 the Board of the Society for the Promotion of Modern Art called into being the "Imperial Ring Scholarship", a special endorsement for young artists, which is being awarded this year to Jan Albers.

The exploding lines of colour in Albers' colour pencil drawings can be linked with the renaissance of the ornamental apparent at international level and which could most recently be witnessed in the selection of Tomma Abts for the Turner Prize. Ornamental patterns are to be encountered today not only in the fine arts, but also in our everyday surroundings - in design, architecture, fashion, lounge and club culture, and in music Videos.

In addition to the cross-border formal analogies, the work of Jan Albers also exhibits features of the ornamental as described by Markus Brüderlin in his crucial publication Ornament and Abstraction: in the history of art, the Ornament, and in particular the arabesque, has a mediating position between abstraction and figuration, and can even become a carrier of moral, social and religious meaning. In the history of ideas, so Brüderlin, the ornament has always been associated with the representation of notions of paradise (Matisse) and of archetypal and spiritual concepts (Mandala, Malevitch). In Albers' drawings of "bearded lads", the flowing rhythm of the movement produces bundles of energy-laden rays. Only on closer observation can schematic heads be made out in the line contours. The sources of Inspiration for these "portraits" range from depictions of Christ to cliche images of Hippies, from bearded lumberjacks to Genghis Khan and Tom Selleck. Albers blends this repertoire of hybrid forms into new and fascinating images which possess an extraordinary beauty. The Düsseldorf artist appropriates stylistic elements from art history and everyday culture by a process of re-forming and unorthodox re-writing. This takes him from Classical Modernism to contemporary art, and from folk art to the World Wide Web. Through ornamentalisation, or, as Brüderlin puts it, the "ornamental refraction" of classical modern positions, contemporary artists express their doubts about the utopian aspects of modernism. They distrust the dynamism of western progress with its theories about improving the world. By contrast, ornament can bring about a dialogue of the cultures in the post-colonial era of globalisation.

Albers, who grew up in Namibia, demonstrates this in his complex room Installation E. Kunz Portal to Robben Island. (Barbara Hess, Brigitte Kölle and Hans Weiss analyse these phenomena in detail in their instructive catalogue essays.)

Dr. Bettina Ruhrberg, Director Mönchehaus Museum


Editions

Links: Galerie VAN HORN, Düsseldorf

Press

Jan Albers and Bettina Ruhrberg - artist talks - Mönchehaus museum Goslar, October 2007