Jochen Klein - After the Light

The MACRO museum’s #Polifonia section, designed to accommodate monographic focuses that explore the work of a single figure with a “polyphonic” approach, hosts the first retrospective in an institutional space of German artist Jochen Klein, who died prematurely in 1997. Intimate and poetic, the exhibition reconstructs his figure, contextualizing his work within the wider collective and personal reflections of the artists who worked with or alongside him: Julie Ault, Thomas Eggerer, Ull Hohn, Amelie von Wulffen and Wolfang Tillmans, who is also curator of the exhibition.

In his artistic career, Jochen Klein worked both with painting, drawing and collage and on conceptual and theoretical projects mirroring his social engagement. Trained in painting at the Munich Academy, he began to question his relationship with this medium in the early 1990s, shifting towards collaborative work. While at the Academy, he shared his discomfort with the self-referential aspect of painting with classmates Thomas Eggerer and Amelie von Wulffen. In 1994, having arrived in New York, he joined the pioneering artist collective Group Material, co-founded by Julie Ault. The following year he began a relationship with artist Wolfgang Tillmans, with whom he moved to London where he returned to painting, producing his last paintings unaware that he had contracted HIV.

The show presents the artist’s earliest works on canvas as well as drawings, watercolors and some sculptural experiments. A book of collaged men’s garments from 1992 offers a glimpse into Klein’s ongoing fascination with the signs of self-fashioning, desire, and masculinity, which also emerge in his last works that combine collage and painting. The exhibition includes reproductions of documentation from Klein and Thomas Eggerer’s collaborative work, a letter about Klein written by Julie Ault, a landscape painting by Ull Hohn, and contributions by Thomas Eggerer, Wolfgang Tillmans and Amelie von Wullfen, selected by the artists themselves from the work they made around the time they knew Klein.