Ramon Keimig
Bent cold sidewalk, 2022/2023
Installation
Silkscreen on canvas (70 x 70 cm), digital print on mesh (432 x 332 cm, 357 x 457 cm, 427 x 352 cm), digital print on paper, cassette cases (10,16 x 6,35 x 1,27 cm), lp-covers (315 x 312 cm), woven blanket (185 x 150cm), crowbar, mercedes-star, metal ashtray, stickers, painted bedside table, mattress, fabric with concrete (90cm x 200cm)
Courtesy the artist
Ramon Keimig’s work has its roots in printmaking and drawing. His materials are ink and pencil on paper, which he combines with digitally created designs. He edits elements drawn by hand with digital imaging and drawing programmes or duplicates them on the photocopier, laser printer and scanner. He then takes the technical fragility as his theme and incorporates random disruptions as new elements in the compositions.
His pictorial motifs derive from references to the subculture and the psychedelic movement of the 1970s as well as his personal environment. Thus, Keimig uses the private photo collection of his father who died at an early age. This includes a few portraits of his father as a young man who, in search of his identity, got caught up in the turbulence of the 1970s, as well as his photographic impressions that reveal a sensitive view of the world. The artist detaches individual elements of this personal archive from their context to embark on a journey back to a time marked by a strong counterculture, criticism of consumerism, aspirations of individualism and a potent musical subculture.
Informed by references from the photocopy aesthetic of the 1970s and 1980s, his motifs pay tribute to tape culture, underground comics and concert flyers. We encounter here his second artistic field: working with experimental musicians from psychedelic and krautrock, and participating in an underground concert scene.
For both his musical and visual work, Ramon Keimig has accurately examined historical sources and draws parallels to himself and his generation. On this basis, he creates new and original visual worlds, which he samples from his own works and combines in new ways. On the computer screen, he draws and creates collages of found imagery and his own drawings. The designs thus produced he transfers to each of the elements of his spatial installation: a stylised bed, a ceiling, scattered drawings, cassette covers, vinyl covers and the walls and ceiling of the imaginary room.
His work is rigorously kept in black and white. A room has been specially created for the exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, a place of retreat – an intimate refuge – into inner worlds, for sleep, for lying down and experiencing mind-expanding practices and escaping into artificial paradises.
Keimig designed the room with essential elements only. Hence, it has become a sculpture, in monochrome grey, abstract, representative of a universal experience. This is set in an implied space. It consists of three surfaces that drift apart, displaced from each other, in an imaginary force of flight. The screens are diaphanous supports for his drawings, which he has transferred from the intimate format of his drawing pads to huge picture surfaces, and which hover over the camp like shadows from a dream world of oversized ghosts and narratives. The drawings interweave images from different eras, from the father’s past, with references to the subculture of the past and present, creating a cycle between the generations, the times, the questions that people have always asked themselves.
Ramon Keimig (*1994 in Aschaffenburg, DE) has been a student of drawing and printmaking at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach with Prof. Mike Bouchet and Prof. Heiner Blum since 2019. Previously, he studied communication design at the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt. His practice also includes the publication of numerous art books for example with Ultimo Mono Press, Sevilla (ES) and Nieves, Zurich (CH). His work has been presented at numerous book fairs such as COZI Festival for Contemporary Comics & Zines, Frankfurt am Main (DE), Druckfestival Hot Printing im Klingspormuseum, Offenbach am Main (DE), NY Art Book Fair, New York City (US), Taipei Art Book Fair, Taipei (TW). Among others, Ramon Keimig has presented his works at Feinkunst Krüger, Hamburg (DE) and at Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main (DE) as part of the exhibition project Frankfurter Kunst Vertrieb organised by the collective Magma Maria.
