Jonathan Penca

Jonathan Penca works in diverse media such as drawing, sculpture, performance and video. Penca’s interest in stage and costume design and dramaturgy resonates in his artistic practice in the negotiation of boundaries between reality and staging. Influences from and deliminations between natural science, pop culture and science fiction offer subjects to reflect on the relation between queer and fluid embodiment as subversive moment and late-capitalist individualization. His sculptures are at times animated, also in collaborative settings. Penca’s manifold approaches have in common that they defer oppositions between the natural and the artificial, or the actor and the represented, until their dissolving. In his works, the artist – also through excessive scales – opens up double-edged, ambiguous spaces, within which the dilemma between in- and hyper visibility are negotiated playfully and the viewer is invited to partake. ...

Deborah Schamoni is a contemporary art gallery based in Munich, Germany. Situated in a 1970s villa, the gallery is able to offer its artists a spacious white cube, flooded with daylight and opening up to a greened outdoor area, as well as an independent smaller room. Since its founding in 2013, the gallery has focused on showing and supporting emerging international artists and it presents an exceptional program that unites international positions with a subversive and self-reflexive approach to art making considering the complexity of human coexistence. The gallery often stages the first shows of upcoming international artists in Germany. The program is developing a distinct profile with artists like Maryam Hoseini, Yong Xiang Li, and Flaka Haliti, who investigate the sociopolitical conditions of queer identity and gender, and share a diasporic experience in their works. Beyond its international focus, the gallery has been playing an important part in establishing Munich as a prominent destination for contemporary art and its discourses. ...