In our second one-person presentation of new works by Julia Oschatz , the artist depicts the ongoing odyssey of the Wesen, a hapless creature with an animal’s head and human body who wanders through her paintings, drawings, and videos on a perpetual, existential, and ultimately fruitless indefinable quest.

In his essay for Oschatz’s exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, curator Chris Cook writes:

“Wesen,” which is German for “being” or “essence,” stars as an idiosyncratic protagonist condemned to a nomadic life, perpetually traveling to places far and wide, frequently stumbling upon rather bizarre and dubious situations. Uncertainty and potential peril underlie these sojourns because the being travels alone and without sight: tragically, it has no eyes and is forever blind to its place in the world …the Wesen’s dilemmas may speak to our own existence in the universe, provoking existential questions about the significance and meaning of life. In Oschatz’s imaginative narrative, however, the being is not equipped to answer these philosophical questions—it simply exists in the universe. Through its cycle of seemingly arbitrary excursions and exercises, the Wesen remains a content being, never failing its purpose to simply be.

The exhibition will feature an installation of paintings on canvas and paper and two new video pieces. In these newest works, Julia Oschatz challenges the boundaries of imagination and empiricism.

In the series of paintings entitled Rebird, Oschatz situates the Wesen within landscapes that have been appropriated from the backgrounds of historically famous paintings such as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, and works by Cranach, Munch, Goya, Velázquez, Poussin, and others, reinterpreting them as “a kind of filmset as seen from the eye of a bird.” These are the artist’s largest and most fully realized works on canvas to date, enacted in contrasting layers of thick impasto and thin veils of muted color. To each work, the artist has added a subtle three-dimensional element: e.g., a small shell in the corner of the Botticelli; a half-submerged boat in the Poussin.

Fiction Follows Forms is a series of forty to fifty works on paper installed in a grid on a black wall. Here, as in the video pieces, the Wesen struggles against the laws of gravity in a kind of cosmic journey that transcends space and time, abstraction and representation.

Born in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1970, Julia Oschatz currently lives and works in Berlin. Among her recent exhibitions are one-person shows at the Institut für moderne Kunst, Nuremberg (2007); Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt am Main (2007); Städtische Galerie Delmenhorst (2007); Städtische Galerie, Wolfsburg (2006); Kunstmuseum Mülheim an der Ruhr (2006); and group shows at the Kunstmuseum Bonn; the Kunsthalle Hamburg; the Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig; and other galleries and museums.

Works by Julia Oschatz are in many distinguished private and public collections including, among others, the Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig; the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.; Progressive Corporation, Mayfield Village, Ohio; the Zabludowicz Art Trust, London; the Städtische Galerie, Wolfsburg, Germany; and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany.

Her first solo museum exhibition in the U.S., Julia Oschatz: Where Else, opens April 4th at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri (through July 6th). Other upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at the Centro de Arte, Caja de Burgos, Spain, and Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion at the Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum of the University of Houston (September 13–November 15, 2008) which will travel to the Gray Art Gallery at New York University in 2009.