Florian Meisenberg: Collecting Essences in a New Sphere

Painting, to me, was and still is a nightmare and a dream at once, because there is no other medium that is so occupied and fraught with its grand tradition and history. Florian Meisenberg (b. Berlin, 1980; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) trained as a media designer before studying painting at the Dusseldorf Academy of Arts with Peter Doig starting in 2004. So making art in the form of websites and videos, drawings and books, installations and performances comes naturally to him. And yet Meisenberg feels that painting is the foundation of his oeuvre and indeed his entire existence. He feels the constant temptation to try and overcome the classical idea of painting, to experiment and transgress boundaries. This book presents Meisenberg’s most recent paintings and new video works. It is important to note that he regards the digital desktop as a no less worthy equivalent to the painted canvas. The new video collages with their superimposed images, he says, constitute a novel animated painting in which the motifs travel through space and time. With essays by Gia Edzgveradze, Gianni Jetzer, and Gregory Williams and a preface by Uta Grosenick.