![]() Wittingly or unwittingly, visitors are made extras in the exhibition or, if so desired, the main characters. ![]() The waist-high hole in the wall of that same room reverses that logic, allowing those present to watch as other visitors become disembodied trouser legs roaming the gallery. The works reveal new, unusual visual angles and perspectives, occasionally serving as a projection surface for one’s own ego, at other times becoming something like a “tool” for casting covert glances at the behaviour of others. As a result, the legs become one’s own visitors themselves become an ever-changing reflection/image. A viewer contemplating one of these lower bodies finds their own face looking back at them in the mirror. Mirrors hang over paintings showing Zöller’s characteristic upper-body-less trouser legs – the same archaic-looking, autonomous-seeming, genderless beings that populate so many of the artist’s works. Its focus on visitors is clear from the explicit title of the show, but also the moment one steps into the first room of the exhibition. Such is also the case with Visitors, his exhibition at the gallery Meyer Riegger. Instead they aim- sometimes more, sometimes less obviously-to activate them, to factor the viewer in as an essential, fundamental component of the work. His paintings and, even more so, his exhibitions, are not self-contained constructs meant to convey a sense of a hermetic unity to the viewer. Jan Zöller is a keen observer of his surroundings with a particular eye for the social structures that determine our day to day interactions. ![]()
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