Dr. León Krempel & Jennifer Bannert – Text for the exhibition „Good Morning America“
Kunsthalle Darmstadt, 2025

 

Good Morning America is the title and greeting of the American breakfast television show that has been broadcast since 1975, kicking off the weekday with news, lifestyle, and weather reports. Jennifer Bannert’s exhibition of the same name is inspired by her travels and stays in the USA and tells of waking up in America in the years since 2023. In her large-format paintings, personal impressions are interwoven with image and text fragments relating to extreme weather events from the American media. Since her first extended stay in Los Angeles, the artist has been searching for a visual language to express the transformations we are currently experiencing.

Jennifer Bannert’s work engages intensively with the concept of the “sublime” in art history and philosophy. In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) defined the sublime—which he also includes the forces of nature—as an aesthetic experience that differs from harmonious beauty and is inseparably linked to feelings of admiration, overwhelm, and fear. However, this sublime did not pose a direct threat, but could be observed from a safe distance, e.g., from the shore. Paradigmatic for this is the romantic sublime of painters such as Caspar David Friedrich and William Turner. In the 20th century, this found new form and expression in the abstraction of American post-war art (Marc Rothko, Yves Klein, Barnett Newman, among others). Jennifer Bannert’s works refer to this tradition, which leads from Romanticism to Modernism, and at the same time testify to a contemporary engagement with the representation of the forces of nature.

According to French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, the sublime, as an expression of the relationship between humans and nature, is more relevant than ever before due to the climate crisis. While Kant’s sublime was merely an aesthetic category, in the 21st century we are confronted with images of real threats. Today, nature no longer represents a stable counterpart, but appears discontinuous and unpredictable. “The sublime of today,” writes Bourriaud in Planet B. Climate Change and the New Sublime (2022), “is the feeling of losing control over the planet.” In this sense, the paintings on display do not show classical landscapes, but simple natural phenomena—such as light and darkness, clouds, water, or rain—in the form of color gradients. These ephemeral events completely fill the picture plane. While the canvas paintings convey a sense of disorientation with their suggestion of diffuse depths, the reflective metal paintings testify to the inherent activity of nature. In both cases, it is almost impossible for viewers to visually fix what they see. Rather, their shadowy reflections in the metals suggest that they are part of the whole. Here, nature is not an objectified counterpart, but self-effective.

The idea and title for the exhibition took shape in 2024. By 2025, the morning glance at America has probably become both a habit and a challenge for many.