Jonas Dehnen’s practice bridges painting, sculpture, and installation, rooted in a fascination with the visual codes of folklore, subculture, and collective memory. Drawing on the iconography of the environments he grew up in—felt hats, Lederhosen, carnival costumes, Morris dancers, Fraktur fonts—his work explores how cultural symbols mutate across time and ideology.

Rather than reproducing these forms, Dehnen reconfigures them. Limbs sprout from objects, costumes transform into hybrid creatures, and historical emblems become unstable, almost vegetal figures. He mines the tension between the individual and the collective, between memory and imagination. Many of the forms he appropriates carry with them the weight of tradition, but in his hands, they shift, twist, and grow—uncertain, uncanny, and alive.

A recurring element in his installations is the three-legged wooden support structures used to present his paintings. These frames evoke tools from folk traditions, yet here they serve dual purposes: simultaneously sculpture and display. They push the canvas into physical space while exposing its vulnerable reverse. The result is a constant negotiation between the flatness of painting and the instability of objects in space.

In Dehnen’s work, history is never static—it is organic, unstable, and subject to reanimation. He creates a visual world where nothing is fixed, and where cultural images—once anchored—begin to tilt, tremble, and transform.