Sebastian Bieniek

Sebastian Bieniek (born 24 April 1975) is a Polish-born, German raised conceptual artist, painter, photographer, performer, author and movie director.
Early life and education
Bieniek was born in , Upper Silesia/Poland, and until the age of 14 he grew up in the Upper Silesian village of Kup. In 1989 he left Poland as a late repatriate (ger. Spätaussiedler, which means: "people with German origins that came mainly in the 80's and 90's from Poland and Russia to Germany").
In 1996 he started to study art at the HbK Braunschweig under the Serbian performance artist and the Swiss conceptual artist John Armleder. In 1998 he changed to UdK Berlin and continued to study art in the class of the German photographer Katharina Sieverding, where he made his first short movie "Zero".
In 2001 he got a grand (residency) of the DFJW in Rennes/France where he spent a half year and took part in a group exhibition called "Aux voyageurs", curated by Bettina Klein. In the same year he graduated at the UdK Berlin.
In 2002 he started to study movie directing at the DFFB Berlin, where he made several movies. His 2007 made full-length movie "The Gamblers" was part of the official competition of the 10th Shanghai International Film Festival. His 2008 made movie "Silvester Home Run" was part of the international short-film competition of the Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata and also shown at the Montreal World Film Festival.
Artwork
The artistic work of Sebastian Bieniek can be roughly divided into film, book and visual art. Visual arts in turn are divided into painting, photography, performance, video, conceptual art, Bieniek-Paint, installation and sculpture according to the categories of technic. In addition, the artist himself shares his work on the oeuvres he thematically divided into Bieniek-Face, Bieniek-Text, Bieniek-Body, Bieniek-Set and Bieniek-Hand. The respective name refers to the respective topic that deals with the work.
Performance
Bieniek's early works were radical performances and actions. For example in 1998 he made a robbery in the Deutsche Bank as an art performance. In 1999 ("Hand Without a Body") he got daily for sixteen days a "V-shaped" wound cut into his arm. And also in 1999 ("Born to be Boulette ") he laid naked for three days in half a ton of raw meat. In the same year (" In Front of the Distance ") he was bleeding on fabric roll when running along it. These were his first works, which also found international mention in the media.
After the break caused by studying of the directing (2002-2008), Bieniek started 2008 again with the performance art. In 2009 for example he appeared disguised in a burqa at the Art Forum Berlin (art fair). In 2011 he made a performance at a livestock market in Georgia. 2011 he performanced disguised as a postman on the "Go West" festival for performance art in Frankfurt, also in 2011 he made a performance on the ARD television show "Es geht um mein Leben" with Pierre Krause. 2012 her made a performance the Art Market Budapest Art Fair, 2013 at the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle and 2016 at the University Church Marburg. In particular, the performance in front of Deutsche Bank KunstHalle attracted media attention again in April 2013. In 2016, Bieniek collaborated with the Millerntor Gallery and Viva con Agua de Santa Pauli e. V. and created under the title "Viva sin Aqua" a performance at Art Basel Miami Beach art fair, which criticized the water wastage of the industrialized countries on the subject.
Video
Since 1999 Bieniek has also been working with video as an independent artistic medium. In an early video from 1999 titled "Crying for This Video" Bieniek put on the forehead of the actors Martin Hagenguth and Miriam Kurth the written sentence "Crying for this Video" and asked them to cry in front of the camera. This resulted in a recurrent motif in Bieniek's work, namely that of the mirrors and simultaneous distortion of reality, which indicates that it is not clear which is the mirror and which the mirrored. In 2012, in the video "The 30 € Truth", he ran through Frankfurt am Main as a DHL parcel delivery agent and persuaded a Burger King employee to walk around the town with him during his working hours to deliver a parcel to himself. In 2013, he slapped himself in the video titled "Art Must Be Serious", laughing and repeating "Art Must Be Serious" again and again, refuting his own testimony and exposing the given as untrue.
Installation art
Already in 1998 Bieniek worked with minimalistic conceptional installations. In 1998, for example, he blowed five thousand white balloons and presented them in the Museum of the Charité (Berlin) entitled "Here rests my breath". Similar to his later (text) works, the text title of the work played an important role here. This was explicitly placed in the middle of the balloon installation on a black board with white letters. The same applies to the 1998 installation "I'm not a nazi", and the in 2000 created work "The world is bad" all leading to the oeuvre of "Bieniek-Text".
Painting
When Bieniek resumed his work as a painter in 2009, after a break by studying movie directing, he began with a series of "Bear Paintings", which were very narrative, sometimes ambivalent, and had a poetic-ironic title, such as for example "Secret Agent Bear Icognito". Also they ware characterized by the fact that they were technically very different and that the idea (concept) seemed always to be more important than the technic. This attitude was followed by the "Two-Faced" series, which was based on the Bieniek-Face idea, and which initially began realistically, but with the progressive series, such as "Faces 80 × 60" (2014), "Duplicato" (2014), "Bicolores" (2016) and "The Beauty and its Secret" (2019) became more and more abstract.
Conceptual art
Since Bieniek himself is referred to as a conceptual artist, conceptual art is one of the consistent oeuvres of his work. Already in 1999, under the title "The drawing that turns around", he drew a DIN A3 sheet of paper every day, on which the parallel drawn lines were - in relation to each other - turning around. In 1999, he burned his own paintings, mixed the resulting ash with glue and made out of it a new artwork titeled "Phoenix Paintings". In 2000, in front of the prison in Rennes (France) and in the prison Celle (Germany), he put up a billboard that presented nothing but the shortest train connection from one prison to the other. In addition he set the text and title of the work "The world is bad". In the same year, as part of the exhibition Transfer in the train station in Braunschweig, he put on a showcase, under which he put a 100,-DM bill. When the bill was, a few hours after the exhibition opening stolen, it revealed a sign that was at the same time the title of the work, "The Stolen 100 DM" and a descrpiption of its creation. In 2012, he presented his own photos, which were cut and painted over by his mother, as conceptual art. In 2016, he hung several picture frames together in a way that they gave the contours of mountains and mountain ranges in their entirety, and named the resulting series "Mountains".
Bieniek-Paint
The Bieniek-Paint oeuvre by Sebastian Bieniek is actually a derivative of the oeuvre of painting, which differs from the latter in that the artist paints (in the case of Bieniek-Paint) on paintings or photographs of others or makes collages of them and then overpaints them. Within this oeuvre, the medium is not that important. Sometimes Bieniek paints over old paintings, sometimes on Dollar notes, sometimes on photographs and sometimes on LPs (Record cover). From 2014 to 2016, five series were created: "Facination" (2014), "Manualism" (2015), "Dollarfaces" (2015), "Ghost Riders" (2016) and "Torsoface" (2016).
Bieniek-Text
Sebastian Bieniek also works with text at least since 2001, if one does not use earlier text components of works such as: As in the performance "Sponsored By" of 1996 counted as a text work. From 2001 to 2015, her created four Bieniek-Text series titled "Three Textartworks", "Textartworks" (2010), "Perfect Circles" (2013) and "Multiplications" (2015). Characteristic of the subject of the œuvre is - as in many other works by the artist - the ambivalence and ambiguity. For example the work "Don't forget that everything will be forgotten" from 2016.
Photography
The series of photos by Sebastian Bieniek made before 2013 include "The Track of the Stones" (1999, ger. "Die Spur der Steine"), "Face Scapes" (2001, ger. "Gesichtslandschaften"), "Victory" (2001), and after 2013: "Hidden Faces" (2013), "Faceation" (2014), "The Way Real Artists Do It" (2014), "Archetypical Sculptures" (2015), "Coupleation" (2015), "Dictators" (2015), "Bodyscapes" (2015), "Interventions" (2016), "Twoneface" (2016), "Extremities" (2017) and "Doll-Body" (2017).
Bieniek-Face
Since 2012 Bieniek the Bieniek-Face œuvre, combining the technics of photography with those of drawing and painting.
The first series of the œuvre was "Secondfaced" (2012), but the first that got a large medial attention was (started in August 2013). Later Bieniek built a whole œuvre under the name Bieniek-Face around the theme of the multiple in portraiture.
Bieniek-Body
The artist's œuvre of Bieniek-Body can be understood as an application of the techniques that Bieniek-Face has tested on the human body. From 2014 to 2017, three Bieniek-Body photo series were created and titled "Man on Canvas" (2014), "Bellyface" (2016) and "Bi-Body" (2017).
Book
2011 Sebastian Bieniek wrote the book REALFAKE (), in which he analyzed group formation and behavior in the social media and supplemented it by his own experiences, experimental arrangements and thoughts.
Movies
Between 2002 and 2017 Sebastian Bieniek made following movies: "" (2007, 87 min.), "Nothing with shoes" (documentary, 2002), "Sand" (2003), "Silvester Home Run" (2005), "Sugar" (orig. "Zucker", 2005), "Anamnesie" (2003), "Entschuldigung Laterne" (2003) and "Zero" (2002).
Collaborations
In 2013 Bieniek collaborated with the German INTRO music magazine for a photo shoot. In 2015 he made a photo shoot for the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazine. In 2015 he collaborated with the French fashion designer Simon Porte Jacquemus at the Paris Fashion Week. In 2016 he cooperated with the "Institute for church building and contemporary art" at the University of Marburg when being a part of the Liturgy Specific Art art-performance serial. In 2016 he also cooperated with the director and Head Curator of the MONA Museum (Australia), Olivier Varenne for his online exhibition project at collectionair.com.
Exhibitions
In 1999 Sebastian Bieniek had his first solo exhibition, named "Natural Born Sugareaters", in the Kunsthaus Tacheles (Berlin). In 2000 he participated in the "Festival of Vision" (Zürich) and the Ho Gallery the Fotogalerie Friedrichshain called "The Melancholy of the Elephants" and the "Views" group show by the Bahrain Arts Society in Manama (Bahrain).
Influence
In 2017-2018 the Italian dancers Federica Aloisio and Sabrina Vicari created a dance-show called EIOKA inspired by Sebastian Bieniek's artwork which was shown across Italy and became the winner of the Premio Strabismi 2017.
In 2015-2016 the Vogue wrote about two internatianal fashion designers who said that their work was inspired by Sebstian Bieniek (Simon Porte Jaquemus and Inês Marques). Also the Caribbean fashion designer Cecilia Devana said that her collection is inspired by the artist.
2014 several international magazines wrote that a scene in the "Marilyn Monroe" video of Pharrell Williams is inspired by Sebastian Bieniek's artwork.

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