The Perfect Gallery

Christian Jankowski

23 apr 2010
6 jun 2010

Pump House Gallery has invited German artist Christian Jankowski to realise an ambitious solo project that will take place in spring 2010. With the artist’s aim to create ‘The Perfect Gallery’ this will mark a significant development in both Jankowski’s practice and the programming aspirations of Pump House Gallery.

Vergroot

Christian Jankowski - source

For ‘The Perfect Gallery’ Jankowski has contracted an interior designer and team of builders to undertake real renovations to the gallery and in conjunction will produce a video that follows the format of an interior-design makeover programme presented by Gordon Whistance. The episode’s aim will be to create ‘the perfect gallery’ from the Pump House Gallery’s idiosyncratic fusion of 19th-century architecture and 1980s interior styling.

As dictated by the reality TV genre, the narrative of the transformation will include dramatic and emotional episodes, discussions on architectural and aesthetic decisions and matters of taste, and inspiration visits to other galleries in London in the quest for ‘The Perfect Gallery’.

Christian Jankowski

Christian Jankowski is a multimedia artist utilising installation, video, sculpture, photography, performance and literature. By combining or juxtaposing different mediums, Jankowski dissolves the borders between fiction and reality and blurs the line between private and public. In previous projects Jankowski has invited horror-movie convention-goers to deliver a threat, in full gory costume, to the person that they would most like to take revenge on; collaborated with an evangelist pastor to deliver a sermon on art; facilitated the ascendance of a Greek television talk show to the status of artwork, and chaired a puppet conference, where such luminaries as Fozzy Bear and Lamb Chop were invited to describe their art and their relationship with television. Working with such collaborators, of varying levels of self-awareness and compliance, Jankowski playfully mirrors their modes and mores back on to them, so that their world may be seen as a fiction built through conventions, clichés and genre-led expectations.