Jonas Dehnen
“A Legato or Your Perfect Hair In The Bathroom Sink, Adorning”

September 20 - October 19, 2025

Jonas Dehnen (DE. 1992) presents A Legato or Your Perfect Hair In The Bathroom Sink, Adorning at Pizza Gallery Ghent.

The exhibition will present an extensive series of interrelated paintings developed over the last two years. The work has accumulated around a number of repeating motifs that triangulate a way forward whilst remaining constant vectors that gradually accumulate riffs and meaning(s) in an iterative and gradual process of picture making. As such, the works constitute diagrams (of a material process, memory and personal history), tokens (of the same things), bridges (between those same things), shelters (for those same things), islands in (and of) the world - all at once. The paintings will be accompanied by a collaborative piece of writing by Alicja Melzacka, Febe Lamiroy and Myrthe van der Mark.

Jonas Dehnen’s practice is stubbornly devoted to traversing the jaded landscape of painterly tropes and conventions. To him, the medium of painting feels like treacherous ground, despite the fact that it’s long been charted. Dehnen interrogates the way in which contemporary paintings and art objects in general performatively parade their purported authenticity.

Each work carefully follows its predecessors, in a slow and iterative picture-making process, in which visual themes grow and develop organically. This primarily plays out in paintings, drawings, and occasionally in three-dimensional work. Motifs drawn from literature intermingle with visual markers of identity. This might include pub signs, carnival floats, vernacular architecture, folk paintings and other elements of visual patois. These undergo a subjective examination led by the (im-)possibilities and the ‘cultural memory’ of the material and of matter itself.