Professor of Experimental Painting and Drawing
Fine Art
Main Building of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 8, Raum 208
99423 Weimar
phone: +49 (0) 175 / 454 95 88
e-mail: jana.gunstheimer[at]uni-weimar.de
Curriculum Vitae
Jana Gunstheimer’s works often begin with a simple hypothesis: what if an absurd claim were not refuted, but instead taken to its logical conclusion with the utmost consistency?
In her drawings, installations, texts and site-specific works, she develops situations with their own internal logic, in which research, speculation and fiction are combined with precise observation. Drawing on ethnological, historical or everyday phenomena, she creates artistic experimental set-ups that do not depict reality, but rather investigate how it is constructed. The focus is on the mechanisms through which narratives, images, rituals or institutional contexts gain authority and produce social realities. Humour, disorientation and the deliberate superimposition of different levels of reality are just as central artistic tools as conceptual precision and formal rigour.
This approach also shapes her teaching. The focus is on the development of independent artistic positions that emerge from a line of inquiry rather than from an attachment to a specific medium. Drawing and painting serve as starting points for open working processes, which naturally include installation-based, performative, spatial or public formats. She regards the studio as a place for collective thinking, experimentation and research, where individual practice and collective working methods have an equal place. Through IRRE@bauhaus – the Institute for Regional Reality Experiments, which she initiated, she has for several years been consistently extending her teaching into the public sphere and, together with students, developing artistic formats at the interface between art, society and institutions.
Jana Gunstheimer studied ethnology and art history at the University of Leipzig, as well as painting and graphic art at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle. Following a visiting professorship in drawing and installation at the HBK Braunschweig, she was appointed to the Bauhaus University Weimar in 2016.
Her works have been exhibited internationally in museums, art centres and galleries, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum Morsbroich, the GEM in The Hague, the Centre Pompidou, the Albertina in Vienna, the Museum Folkwang and, most recently, as part of the ‘Purple Path’ programme for Chemnitz, European Capital of Culture.
Jana Gunstheimer has received numerous grants and awards for her work, including the Villa Massimo Grant from the Federal Republic of Germany, the Walter Dexel Prize and the Falkenrot Prize
Her works are held in major public collections, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum and the Dresden State Art Collections.
Artist’s books and exhibition catalogues are published regularly to accompany her artistic practice.
Expertise
Regional experiments with reality, drawing as a form of thought, constructions of reality, artistic narrative strategies, spatial narratives, artistic concepts of space, textile practices, the transformation of craft techniques, material cultures, humour and absurdity as artistic strategies, collective imagination, art and the public sphere, spaces of possibility