Remy Jungerman

Remy Jungerman (b. 1959, Suriname) lives and works in Amsterdam. He attended the Academy for Higher Arts and Cultural Studies, Paramaribo (Suriname), before moving to Amsterdam where he studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. His work explores both Afro-diasporic culture and the Western modernist art tradition. Since his first group exhibition in the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, Jungerman has participated in several solo and group exhibitions worldwide. In 2008 he received the Fritschy Culture Award from the Museum het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands.

His work has been featured in numerous publications and has been acquired by various institutions and private collectors worldwide including: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Museum Het Domein Sittard; Zeeuws Museum Middelburg; Museum de Paviljoens Almere; NAI Rotterdam; Fries Museum Leeuwarden; Africa Museum Berg en Dal; Museum for Modern Art, Arnhem; Rennies Collection, Vancouver; Art Omi Collection, NY; and The Francis J. Greenburger Collection, NY. He is the co-Founder and curator of Wakaman Project.

Afro-Surinamese spirituality, or Winti, has become an increasingly dominant theme in the work of Remy Jungerman (b. 1959), who was born in the small Maroon community of Moengo in Suriname on the northern Atlantic coast of South America. Jungerman has lived in the Netherlands for two and a half decades. Like the microphones in his earlier sculptural work, his current wall-mounted installations seek to translate and communicate, interweaving Old and New World messages through different media and new localities. They simultaneously validate “outsider” aesthetics in “insider” spaces and interlock in conversation two completely different worlds.

Continuing to engage with geometric configurations, as in his earlier work, Jungerman delves into the lines, patterns, and ancient forms present in the accouterments and apparatus of his Afro-Atlantic religious roots. While Haitian, Cuban, and Brazilian artists have explored Vodou, Santería, and Candomblé, respectively, for decades, Jungerman is one of the first Dutch Caribbean artists to assert the significance of his Maroon heritage and to reflect in his work a resistance and liberation ideology, in contrast to the assimilation mechanisms employed by some Surinamese living in Dutch society today. Perhaps the most striking common denominator in the artist’s recent sculptures is his indulgence in indigo as both a hue and a mood. The penetrating, enchanting color is predominant in the ritual cloth of the Maroons, often infused with white polka dots or the intersecting white lines that compose their characteristic plaid. Jungerman’s manipulation of navy blue, white, and red is both a nod to the twentieth-century Dutch De Stijl movement and a manifestation of a diasporic African retention.