Christian Jankowksi
Wedding Gift

5 JUN until 30 AUG 2025

Contemporary Fine Arts is pleased to present Christian Jankowski’s third solo exhibition, Wedding Gift.

The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. The title of a self-help book described as ‘a revolutionary red book that helped a generation work smarter, better and faster’ by Jeff Sutherland, is prominently displayed on one of the works in the exhibition Wedding Gift. Christian Jankowski’s artistic production seems to have adopted this book title as its motto. The artist knows no standstill in his quest to critically and humorously question our world and the art world.

In the transport crates on display, works of art are driven, flown or shipped from A to B. Some of these crates find their way back to the artist’s warehouse, others end up in a museums’ storage facility or in a private collection. All of this is documented with stickers from the respective transport companies, galleries or institutions. Ideally, these boxes do not come backat all, or at best empty. The chances of this happening could certainly be increased if artists and gallery owners would read Secrets of Closing the Sale.

This new body of work began with Jankowski’s museum exhibition I was Told to Go with the Flow at the Kunsthalle Tübingen in 2022. Before its opening, he navigated a small boat loaded with transport crates down the Neckar River. The boat and its cargo were then hoisted into the Kunsthalle by crane and exhibited.

In our current presentation, these boxes form the central works of the exhibition. In addition to stickers documenting their journey and the exhibition venues of their contents, they bear the titles of self-help books and advice guides.

With the titles of these life and career coaching books, Jankowski also addresses the pressure on artists to succeed in an art market increasingly shaped by neoliberal ideas, in which artists are misunderstood as service providers, but he also questions the equally questionable romantic myth of the suffering artist. Book cover designs such as Die Stimme des Herzens (the voice of the heart) or Happy Life Formula refer to an ongoing search for self-knowledge and optimisation. These books promise utopias – a carefree and successful live the shaping of which lies solely in our hands.

The idea of utopias continues in the series Luftschlösser (Castles in the Air). The series combines imagination with architecture through a collaboration between the artist and various workers, including electricians, carpenters, plumbers and other craftsmen. When visiting the construction sites of prestigious new buildings, Jankowski collects discarded construction plans and notes and asks the workers to draw the castle of their dreams. The small sketches, mostly made during lunch breaks, serve as templates for neon sculptures that transform the workers’ architectural fantasies into luminous reality. The red neon castle on display here, entitled Luftschloss Olymp (Olympus Castle in the Air), was sketched by foreman Andreas B. at the Berlin Modern construction site – a new museum currently being built in the heart of Berlin based on a design by architects Herzog & de Meuron.

The exhibition opens just before the artist’s wedding to Cristina Vasilescu – and Jankowski wouldn’t be Jankowski if he were to settle for gifts from his guests. As so often, he turns things upside down and offers us a gift.

Christian Jankowski, born in 1968 in Göttingen, Germany, is one of the most successful and influential multi- media performance and conceptual artists of his generation. He lives and works in Berlin. His works have been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions and are included in the Falckenberg Collection in Hamburg, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the ICA Boston, the SFMOMA San Francisco and the Tate London, among many others. In 2016, Jankowski was the first artist to curate the 11th Manifesta in Zurich.