Christian Jaramillo

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Braun-Falco Galerie is delighted to present its fourth solo exhibition of works by Christian Jaramillo with his show La Audiencia.

The exhibition draws its title from "the audience", a conferred formal hearing with a much higher ranked person such as a monarch or a pope. Historically at the audience hours, approved individuals from the general population received a few minutes notice for proclaiming personal or general points of interest. The hearing took place at a special audience room demonstrating the absolutistic power of the person to be admired.

With La Audiencia, Christian Jaramillo created a painted room installation symbolizing such an audience room. Each of the four walls depicts particular concerns of acting power such as the sway of a dictator, abuse of authority, corruption, personal and sexual abuse, stigmatization of certain races and minor groups, ecological devastation on nature and animals, as well as the superabundance of lifestyle.

Christian Jaramillo was raised in Colombia, a country with one of the richest biodiversity in plants and animals and in contrary to its natural beauty which has been under colonial power for hundreds of years and following its independence suffered from several civil wars even until recently. His personal experience with the nature and history of his homeland made him sensitized towards the abuse of power in any instances. His thoughts are devoted to the affliction of the poor and other minor groups among them children, woman and racial subgroups as well as the devastation of nature and wildlife. In his working process, he studies master pieces of European art from the renaissance to the romantic and remodels their motifs for his own compositions. His works appear in a neo-baroque style, some flamboyant others more pastel in color annotated with many small elements and subtle symbols. The artist states himself to bring people to explore what's hidden. A striking element throughout his work is the intensive use of a skull instead of faces at life. The skull instead of a beautiful Madonna-like face, the skull instead of the leader's strong visage…, the skull as the symbol of how we all will end up despite of where we came from, does - visce-versa - nobilitate each individual into the artistocratic environment of which the motive originally belonged to. With this and other mechanisms Christian Jaramillo wants to make a statement in favor for the minors criticizing any kind of abuse of power.

Christian Jaramillo (b. 1984, Colombia) lives and works in Munich, Germany, where he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2012 as a master pupil of late Axel Kasseböhmer with the diploma for painting. He was selected as one out of 56 participating students from all over Germany at the ATLAS 2013 exhibition at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn. Since then, his works were shown in multiple solo and group shows around Germany, lately in the Neue Kunstverein Regensburg, Kunstverein Speyer, and Instituto Cervantes, Munich. A solo show is in planning at Kunstverein Erlangen for 2020.