DEN ANSIKSLOSE, 17.- 19. JULI 2025
Eine Ausstellung von JURE GRANDO
Sound: MATTHIAS REILING
Vernissage :17.07.2025, 18-21 Uhr
Finissage: 19.07.2025, 18-20 Uhr
-Den Ansiktslose-
Jure Grando
„Reiche mir die Hand du Gesichtsloser und sicherlich wirst du die Bitterkeit meines Schmerzes schmecken.“
Grando’s masks are made from parts bearing memento of ruins and forgotten places scavenged from, being sculpted by cold, decay, fire and deformation. Komm in meine Welt und ich werfe Schatten in deine Wunden. Verschlucke meine Zunge und ich werde dein Herz umarmen, bis du kein Herz mehr hast.“ Each piece has been visited by Matthias Reiling, breathing disturbing, undeadlik accoustic textures and synthetic noise into the covered faceless frowns, challenging the threshold to the occult. The exhibition is a worship of this obscure gathering. „We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.“
Jure Grando
Born: October 21, 1974 – Koper, Slovenia. Current Residence: Mobile, itinerant across Europe
Known For: Occult-influenced sculpture, rare exhibitions in obscure venues, and rumored connections to arcane traditions.
Jure Grando is a Slovenian-born sculptor whose haunting, otherworldly creations have drawn whispers of reverence and unease in equal measure. While his public appearances are rare and his exhibitions even rarer, those fortunate—or unfortunate—enough to encounter his work often describe it as „art pulled from the threshold between madness and divinity.“
Early Life
Raised along the windswept Adriatic coast in the old port town of Koper, Grando displayed an early fascination with religious iconography, prehistoric art, and the forgotten relics of Balkan folklore. After brief studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, where he was expelled for creating a „profoundly disturbing“ thesis exhibition involving fossilized animal parts and submerged clay figurines, Grando vanished from the European art scene altogether for nearly seven years.
Miskatonic University Years
Official records are scant, but credible sources—including a 2009 New Yorker investigative article and several entries in the underground Codex Ænigmata—suggest that Grando re-emerged in Arkham, Massachusetts, sometime in late 1999. He is rumored to have studied under Dr. Laban Shrewsbury, a semiretired ethnologist known for his research into pre-human civilizations and forbidden artifacts.
While the administration of Miskatonic University denies his enrollment, faculty correspondences from the Department of Comparative Mythology make cryptic reference to a “Gran’tho,” whose sculptural interpretations of the Elder Sign were “disturbingly accurate.”
Art historians have drawn parallels between his work and pre-Sumerian idol fragments, Cycladic figurines, and even Aztec death effigies—though none can explain his apparent knowledge of extinct dialects and unknown symbologies.
Grando himself claims to …“translate shapes seen in dreams and remembered from lives not lived…“, whereas one anonymous collector has been qutoted: “Owning a Grando is like owning a key to somewhere you never wanted to go.”
Legacy and Rumors
Jure Grando’s legacy is complicated by growing internet lore. A handful of conspiracy theorists claim his art opens “doorways.” A discredited Parisian occultist even alleged that Jure sculpted a shoggoth chrysalis in Prague in 2012. Grando dismissed such claims as “absurd and flattering in equal measure.”
Matthias Reiling
Born August 30th 1979 in Braunschweig. Current Residence: The outskirts of Hamburg, Northern Germany
Musical composer Reiling cites literature pieces like Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 „The King in Yellow“ or Arthur Machen’s „The Hill Of Dreams“ from 1907 as strong inspirations for himself as well as a „common ground“ and „critical aesthetical intersection“ with Grande in the run up to this very collaboration.
For his work in Den Ansiktslose, he focusses on fusing sonic textures from different samplerates with unanticipated musical fragments and frequency modulation.