Jonathan Podwil

Jonathan Podwil has achieved air superiority in his studio. No, it is not the artist himself who flies. Instead, he has played out a small chapter of the Second World War here with a model dive bomber, and created an “authentic” documentary film so convincing in appearance that it seems like it was filmed by a Luftewaffe co-pilot during the Battle of Britain. The Stuka loop is the successful visual equivalent of a scratched vinyl record, which repeatedly jumps to the same starting point. Typical in his work the symbiotic relationship between the moving and the motionless images (i.e. the cinematic aesthetics of his painting and the more pictorial aesthetics of his films). Podwil switches fluidly back and forth between painting and film and converts found cinematic material to painting. In other words, he creates “found material” himself, in order to then “find” it.

{Claudia Aigner, review of “Reisen Sie in Eine Neue Welt,” at T19 Galerie, Vienna, Austria, in Wiener Zeitung, January 5^th, 2001}

Jonathan Podwil is a painter and a digital filmmaker, and studied art in Sweden and in Philadelphia. He has participated most recently in exhibitions at the IG Bildende Kunst, Vienna, in May, 2002 and at Smack Mellon Studios, Brooklyn, Summer 2002. His work will be included in the traveling exhibition "Atomica," curated by Ombretta Agro originating at the neues Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland Spring 2003.