Jonny Niesche »Chocolate Box Portals«

Chocolate Box Portals, 2020

Jonny Niesche’s Chocolate Box Portals are an offspring of a recent show titled Cosmos Cosmetics in which he pays sensual homage to the visual sub-culture of the Glam Rock era, which the artist was impressed by early on as a boy growing up in the 1980s. As a result, leading figures such as Debbie Harry from the band Blondie or David Bowie, or moreover visual details of their attire and make-up, became a source for several work-cycles of Jonny Niesche.

The works of the Chocolate Box Portals series, precious and petit as a box of praline chocolates, seem to be absorbing the gaze of the viewer. And, as if citing Martin Kippenberger’s work-cycle Metro-Net for which he conceived a metro system interconnecting the world and constructed props of realistic entrances into metro terminals situated in the most unlikely places, Jonny Niesche’s portals seem to invite the viewer to walk into another space. The magnetic attraction of the portals is intensified by a moiré effect produced by the double layered voile fabric. Their minimalist appeal is edged by a dramatic golden frame which creates an intriguing tension between kitsch and magic.

Jonny Niesche

Jonny Niesche (*1972 in Australia) lives and works in Sydney. Steered by the visual metrics of the Glam Rock era and its cosmetic counter culture, he creates sublime paintings, sculptures, and installations that wrestle with the perceptions of colour, surface, and spatiality. By employing complex steel fabrications, mirrors, and digital painting processes on transparent fabric, he brings forth an experiential trigger that is part psychosexual, metaphysical, superficial, and rhapsodic, luring the viewer into a personal moment of “performative contemplation.”

Niesche holds a Master of Fine Arts at Sydney College of the Arts and studied under Heimo Zobernig at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In 2015, he was awarded the Fauvette Loureiro Travelling Scholarship. He has staged numerous solo shows, notably at Zeller van Almsick in Vienna, New Jörg Kunstverein in Vienna, Lundgren Gallery, Palma de Mallorca, Sarah Cottier Gallery in Sydney and Station Gallery Melbourne. Niesche has participated in group shows at Artspace in Sydney, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. The Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney also Commissioned Niesche to make a new work for Vivid festival with Mark Pritchard. His work is held in the collections of Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and in private collections across USA, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Read our story with Jonny Niesche in his studio.

Photos: Jessica Maurer, Hugh Stewart (portrait)