About

Atist and curator Jonny Star lives and works in Berlin. Star’s work blends a variety of materials and media such as bronze, fabric, photography, collage, embroidery, painting, and elements of installation art. Star works in an interplay of analogue and digital techniques, whereby the artist repeats patterns or references since decades and thus creates a connecting web in her work. Her ensembles explore biographical experiences, sexuality, gender roles, and identity and how it is perceived by society. In recent years the artist explores intensely interfaces between art & shamanism, healing processes through the resource of the artistic expression and community building through artistic interventions. Star sees her curated group exhibitions as an extension of her artistic work and in the spirit of a social sculpture. Jonny Star’s work is shown internationally since 1996. In 2016, the artist's first monograph entitled "See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me" was published by Distanz Berlin. The artist initiated curatorial projects in Berlin like SchauRaum Berlin (1996-1998), Jonny´s (2007-2009), Sweet Home (2011 - 2012) and Superuschi (2013 – ongoing). Jonny Star is a member of the Berufsverband Bildender Künstler*innen Berlin (BBK), a member of the VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and a member of Saloon Berlin - Network for Women in Berlin´s Art Scene, which is part of the international Saloon Network. Jonny Star has also been working as a psychological and shamanic counselor since 2022 at her new place STAR LAND in Berlin.

“Jonny Star’s art is physical, spatial and corporeal. Her works are entirely present in the space – they occupy it, make one aware of it, define it and open it all at once. She is not out to develop a style that criticizes or comments on this or that – her work is about her love of being alive, of life, which does not distinguish between ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘we’ and ‘you’, or ‘us’ und ‘them’. And even if the sheer heterogeneity of her works might appear to suggest that they are somehow contradictory, they are in fact all pursuing the same aim – of being objects within a community of human beings and having an impact in their own individual contexts.”

“Her artistic concept is to turn everything into art – things, situations and actions alike – in the same way that sculptors use their hands to form a work of art from some kind of ‘material’. The term ‘sculptor’ seems perfectly appropriate here in connection with Jonny Star’s cast objects. However, it seems a little more far-fetched with regard to the collages and wall hangings. The affinity of the fabric wall hangings to ‘female’ craft skills and (motivically) to politically correct ‘gender art’ and its focus on identity is hard to reconcile with the expressivity and intuition of the bronzes. But both constitute the same artistic, quasi-sculptural, ‘plastic’ praxis. Jonny Star is a builder – only in her case she creates something entirely new from the items she accumulates.”

(Both quotes taken from Eva Meyer-Hermann, "Art as Foodstuff in Jonny Star. See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me, Distanz, 2016)