11.05.2026-12.05.2026
CLOSE ENCOUNTER
Jérôme Zonder I Jan Steenman at GOWEN LAB
Exposition au GOWEN LAB rue Jean-Calvin 4
For the Autumn edition of Art en Vieille-Ville (AVV) vernissages en commun, GOWEN is excited to present Close Encounter, a joint exhibition by leading French artist and draughtsman Jérôme Zonder (b. 1974, Paris) and Swiss artist-sculptor Jan Steenman (b. 1994, Geneva).
On view at the gallery’s second space, conceived to offer a more immediate encounter with experimental works, the show brings together a selection of Zonder’s small-format drawings with sculptural work by Steenman.
Moving between precise figuration or portraiture, caricature and abstraction, Zonder works predominantly with pencil, graphite and charcoal, often applying and smudging pigment directly with his fingertips. At this reduced scale, fingerprints, lines and accumulations of graphite reveal the physical gestures through which the image is made. Drawn from sources ranging from art history and popular culture to cinema and comics, his images shift between the familiar and the unsettling, often resisting a single or immediate reading.
In Numinous, 2025, a performative sculpture by Steenman, his body is concealed within the ceramic form, becoming part of the structure’s being and activating the work from within. A human presence reveals itself only gradually, shifting the viewer’s perception between body and object. Like Zonder’s drawings, the work asks for close and sustained looking: what appears at first to be a self-contained form begins to disclose another presence or image.
Presented in close proximity, the pairing brings into focus a questioning of what a portrait can be, as well as a shared concern with the body as both image and material presence. In Zonder’s works, which question the very notion of portraiture, the body enters the drawing through the direct trace of the artist’s fingers; in Steenman’s, the body is physically absorbed into the sculpture itself. Across these distinct approaches, figuration emerges, disappears and reappears, while familiarity gives way to strangeness.
Image
Jérôme ZONDER
Les fruits du dessin #76, 2018
Graphite et fusain sur papier, 24 x 32 cm, © The Artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia