BASTARD (BARBENHEIMER) is a limited artist edition within Kneer's BASTARDS franchise.

The BASTARDS series are monochrome printed silver mirrors with custom-made galvanized frames. Each one features a layered collage of seemingly random movie posters. Through crossbreeding ready-made opposing narratives and by sifting through themes of morality and the foundational principles of the human psychology, Kneer’s “movie posters” become contemporary zeitgeist artifacts that confront our supposed socio-cultural binaries of right and wrong, art and pop, and sickness and health. Kneer breaks them down into their constituent parts, and releases them for recasting in a value-free queer space.

“All art is at once surface and symbol,” Kneer points me towards an excerpt of the Preface to the Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. “Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” Cinema, with its inherent immersionary quality, demands you go beneath the surface of the image. It is, indeed, a perilous aesthetic experience that is difficult to passively engage in. So, while these BASTARDS might sound so simple in their bare description — collages of film imagery — they actually open up the viewer to experiencing a very unique and strange form of the sublime.
– JULIAN-JAKOB KNEER and his BASTARDS, Adam Lehrer for STUDIO magazine, Zurich 2023