Artist – Dennis Josef Meseg

„Das Leben findet in Wellen statt“
— Dennis Josef Meseg, 2020

About the artist

Dennis Josef Meseg discovered his love for art at a young age. The urge for artistic freedom made him leave home early.

At the age of just 23, he caused a sensation as the youngest painter in a collective exhibition at the French Gallery du Haut-Pavé in Paris – under the pseudonym “John Christoph Dionysos Sommersberg”. At that time Dennis had already sold many of his works over the Internet, that brought him to the attention of M.Doucet from Paris. Mr. Doucet was the former director of the Société Générale in Paris and a passionate art collector. Convinced of Dennis’s artistic potential, he bought several exhibits for the private family collection and also unceremoniously offered him participation in a joint exhibition in Paris.

As luck would have it, Dennis had not understood the topic, as his knowledge of the French language was rather poor. Consequently the works made for this exhibition could not be shown. Spontaneously, Mr. Doucet decided to use works from his private collection of Dennis for the exhibition, but had to mark them as “sold” at the very beginning of the exhibition, which caused confusion among the visitors and resulted in an extremely increased demand for Dennis’ works. So to speak, an unintentional first form of the “artificial scarcity” so often intentionally used today to fuel the interest, desire and need of customers.

Left to his own device he took any job that came his way to earn a living, since he could not live from art alone. Early on, he realized that two souls were in conflict within him. The soul of an artist and the soul of an entrepreneur. In the end, with a heavy heart and for financial reasons, he decided to put art aside for the time being and follow the call of the entrepreneur. In the first half of his life, he then occupied himself with founding a small media agency, which today gives him the financial freedom to realize his rather costly projects without having to rely on sponsors.

At the age of almost 40, he had succeeded in finally realizing his dream as an artist.

In 2019 he applied to Alanus University, near Bonn, with his art presentation and was certified an extraordinary artistic talent by two independent art professors that secured him admission to the art studies at Alanus University.
He spontaneously decided to study sculpture, attracted by the abundance of materials he saw when visiting the sculpture studios of his fellow students.

From the very beginning on the driving force of his art was the attempt to make thoughts and emotions literally tangible, to find himself, to recognize, to define. Dennis Josef Meseg has remained true to this philosophy of life to this day:

„Je dessine comme je sens, comme je respire, comme je vis… Tout à l’émotion“ – Paris 2003

“I let every single record work on me using a special breathing technique in order to find out its secret. Every feeling that penetrated me, recognized as a special moment, was then documented in one or more cuts”. – Installation “A Thousand Moments | Bonn 2020″

His work with a wide variety of materials, including stone, wood, steel or colors, is created in smaller steps and is on the one hand conceptual but also process-oriented. They arise from the subconscious and let it discover new sides of itself again and again.

His Corona installation “It is like it is”, created out of the emotion to point out the appreciation and gratitude for what we have, is now internationally known.

His installation “Broken/ (Un)Broken” is a memorial made up of 222 mannequins, the artistic processing of which is intended to make the limitless cruelty of women and girls visually comprehensible. It was shown for the first time in Siegburg on November 25, 2020 on the occasion of the International Days of Action against Violence against Women.

Now, at the age of 42, the soul of the entrepreneur and the soul of the artist have slowly united and now work together and no longer against the artist Dennis Josef Meseg.