Johannes Wohnseifer’s paintings hijack ready-made cultural signifiers and reassemble them as invented logos. Both comically absurd and ideologically threatening, his paintings infuse the frivolity of advertising with an underlying propaganda and cultural hierarchy. Packaging subversive messages with high art impunity, Wohnseifer uses the language of consumerism as a means to signpost personal identification within a contemporary zeitgeist. Remastering their aesthetic properties, his slick images implicate corporate culture, national identity and contemporary art in his cleverly coded conspiracy theories.
ohannes Wohnseifer appropriates ready made cultural signifiers and reassembles them as invented logos. Both comically absurd and ideologically threatening, his paintings on aluminium infuse the frivolity of advertising with an underlying propaganda, subversive messages repackaged as high art design. Braun Sugar is a painting made specifically for a London audience: a witty merger of The Rolling Stones typeface with brand name German electric appliances infers an uncomfortable politic. Entrenched in the jargon of Pop, this painting makes a sly reference to a work by Richard Hamilton.
Johannes Wohnseifer uses the language of consumerism as a means to sign-post personal identification within a contemporary zeitgeist. His slick designs suggest corporate culture, national identity and art history, re-mastering their aesthetic properties as coded conspiracy theories. In Behind the Stripes, Wohnseifer’s image makes ironic reference to conceptual painting. Appropriating the colours of Olt Aicher’s design scheme for the 1972 Munich Olympics, Wohnseifer infuses his logo with implied menace. Through the impersonality of media-style messaging, Wohnseifer draws autobiographical significance, citing the interrupted broadcast of the games as his earliest television memory.To get to Johannes Wohnseifer's recent exhibition, which was curated by Rita Kersting and housed in the project room of the Museum Ludwig Koln, one had to pass through the permanent collection; in the middle of Pop Art, one came up against a white nylon curtain on which "MUSEUM" was written in huge black type. Pushing the curtain aside, one entered a large room only to stop at the sight of sixteen square wood panels laid across the floor (each approximately 6.5 by 6.5 feet) and painted in colorful monochromes. The luminosity of the panels initially caused even the Carl Andre-seasoned visitor to step back for a moment before venturing inside. Set up amid the pane}s were three pedestals of various sizes on which the artist presented, under Plexiglas, prototypes for the sneakers he developed in collaboration with Adidas. In combination with three paintings of eagles based on pictures by Gerhard Richter (some of which were made for Marcel Broodthaers's 1968-72 Musee d'Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles) and extracts from On Kawara's journal that were dated 1967 (the year Wohnseifer was born), it became clear that the exhibition was about more than being just another variation of the now-exhausted art of crossovers, in this case between (sport) design and art.
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