John Bock - Ex-Ego-Gynt - Berlin

John Bock and Lars Eidinger in conversation, moderated by Georg Imdahl
Sprüth Magers, Berlin
December 11, 2023

The works of sculptor, action artist, filmmaker and author John Bock are experiments in material and language that challenge the traditional boundaries within the art world.

Bock composes spectacular and absurd structures wherein he stages his lectures and films. The artist’s solo exhibition Ex-Ego-Gynt at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, transforms the gallery space into Bock’s characteristically unique artistic cosmos and premieres his latest film alongside several new objects and an installation.

The walls are lined with vitrines: the so-called boxes (“Kisten”) made from vibrant red and blue colored modules alternate between open and semi-open segments.

John Bock
Untitled, 2023
Red and blue powder-coated steel display case with blue Plexiglas, wooden head with razor blade in Babybel wax and screw clamp with small objects, old film editing equipment, aluminum object
80 × 165 × 54 cm
31 1/2 × 65 × 21 1/4 inches

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John Bock
Untitled, 2023

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John Bock
Untitled, 2023

John Bock
Untitled, 2023 (detail)

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John Bock
Untitled, 2023 (detail)

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Inside are wooden carvings of Bock’s grimacing head, as well as objects cast from aluminum. Together, the small sets form a scenic sequence. A cautious optimism reverberates through both form and content, contrasting the artist’s strange and gloomy pictorial worlds of past years.

John Bock
Untitled, 2023
Red and blue powder-coated steel display case with red Plexiglas, vice with clamped half glasses, aluminum object, wooden head with caliper, pepperoni and ring, card index box with bronze torso
79 × 174 × 67 cm
31 × 68 1/2 × 26 3/8 inches

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John Bock
Untitled, 2023 (detail)

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John Bock
Untitled, 2023 (detail)

John Bock
Ex-Ego-Gynt
Installation view, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, November 18, 2023–January 27, 2024

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John Bock
Ex-Ego-Gynt
Installation view, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, November 18, 2023–January 27, 2024

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John Bock collaborated with Lars Eidinger to develop a visually powerful play based on Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic poem “Peer Gynt.” It premiered at Berlin’s Schaubühne in 2020 and serves as the foundation for Bock’s latest film.

John Bock, Ex-Ego-Gynt, 2020/2023 (film excerpt)

Against the backdrop of Peer’s home farm, featuring a milking parlor and an enormous udder made from pullovers sewn together, Eidinger, clad in loud costumes, plays an outsider who fabulates the story of his life, blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality.

John Bock
Ex-Ego-Gynt, 2020/2023
HD video
106:55 min
Edition of 5 + 1 AP

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The farmer’s son turns into a present-day con man and lunatic: a greed-crazed finance type (“Finanzhai-Heini”) in a pinstripe suit with literal deep pockets and a mad scientist explaining Ted Kaczynski’s “Unabomber Manifesto.” Unfolding between neologisms and onomatopoeias, objects, acting, and a sculptural set is a complex and humorous web of references and associations that refuses to be read in one particular way.

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John Bock
Ex-Ego-Gynt, 2020/2023
HD video
106:55 min
Edition of 5 + 1 AP

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John Bock
Ex-Ego-Gynt, 2020/2023
HD video
106:55 min
Edition of 5 + 1 AP

John Bock
Ex-Ego-Gynt, 2023 (film still)

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John Bock
Ex-Ego-Gynt, 2023 (film still)

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John Bock
Ex-Ego-Gynt, 2023 (film still)

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In the center of the gallery space is an installation. Stretched athwart a wooden panel lying on the floor, four ties form a cross and somewhat of a stage for one of Bock’s lectures about parapsychology, pleasure and death.
Here, too, the artist places equal emphasis on word and image. Complemented by a plexiglass panel on which objects and Bock’s coinages are connected diagrammatically to tripod-mounted boards by red threads, the installation becomes a collage of superimposition and compression.

John Bock
The Ex-Ego Assembles a Lump of Fume in the Everyman, 2022/2023 (detail)
Diagrammatic collage of three panels and two tripods connected with woolen threads, textile sausage and metal lace:
Two metal panels with photos and textile surfaces, Plexiglas field with applied material mix, horizontal wooden field with tie cross and textile corners next to small objects, on it double T-beam with rotary motor and lettering, metal panel on tripod with aluminum object and egg, potholder with clock and pills, metal panel on tripod with aluminum object, umbrella joint and compass
Dimensions variable

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John Bock
The Ex-Ego Assembles a Lump of Fume in the Everyman, 2022/2023

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John Bock
The Ex-Ego Assembles a Lump of Fume in the Everyman, 2022/2023

John Bock
The Ex-Ego Assembles a Lump of Fume in the Everyman, 2022/2023 (detail)

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John Bock
The Ex-Ego Assembles a Lump of Fume in the Everyman, 2022/2023 (detail)

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John Bock
The Ex-Ego Assembles a Lump of Fume in the Everyman, 2022/2023 (detail)

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The exhibition Ex-Ego-Gynt showcases John Bock’s unremitting expansion of the concept of art that keeps on recontextualizing the processual, ever-changing artwork and continues creating new networks.

Visitors move between the different stages that establish a dialogic relationship with one another. What emerges is a cohesive universe marked by an interest in madness, the uncanny, and the human psyche, but also by humor and exuberance, which constantly realigns the framework of its own perception.

John Bock
Untitled, 2023
Red and blue powder-coated steel display case with red and blue Plexiglas, wooden head with aluminum object and small objects, knitted figure with light bulb, aluminum object with spirit level
80 × 188 × 71 cm
31 1/2 × 74 × 28 inches

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