Female Warrior #6 "Behind the Line", Pencil on board, 1982Ludwig Wittgenstein, Pencil on board, 1985The Bible – Solomon – Song of Songs 8, 6-7, Acrylic, rich pale gold and cloth on linen, 1997God gave us another Gift # 9 – Blue Flower – Novalis", Photography, 2013Christian Cross 5, Oil on canvas, 2020
Tonnis' works are "supported with psychological knowledge"[1] His earliest drawings reflect his interest in psychoanalysis and psychopathology such as, catatonic rigidity or the postnatal psychosis depicted in his 1980–85 collection. To "show the psychic as a second face" he "uses stitchings, masks and fragments of masks—they are sometimes barely visible"[2]
... in his portraits the artist Christiaan Tonnis shows us the tears in the psyche that are written into faces. In these paintings these faces are, as it were, stage areas of a forgotten Drama, only readable as old and rigid courses of action but with traces of the internal (hidden) foreigner ...
In 1986, he started to paint landscapes from literature like the "Magic Mountain (after Thomas Mann)" and portraits of writers and philosophers as William S. Burroughs, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and more. His large scale triptych "Frost" is "a material image in harsh black and white which depicts a literary landscape of snow and ice in different viewpoints [...] a picturesque transformation of Thomas Bernhards 1963 novel".[3]
"Catwalk!" was exhibited at the Showroom Eulengasse in Frankfurt, Germany in 2007. The exhibition consisted of a series of collages created of cats' heads on women's bodies. The most recognizable bodies are those of Virginia Woolf "with big, sad eyes" and Kate Moss.[5]
In 2006 Tonnis set up a MySpace page dedicated to Thomas Bernhard, using pictures tell his biography. The theme of the page was Bernhard's motto "In the darkness everything becomes clear."
2009: During the "Sommeratelier" at Kunstverein Familie Montez, Frankfurt,[7] he created a painting for the performance "Who let the dogs out, Edith?". This "experimental collage of different media and arts" has been a dialogue with Heinrich von Kleist's play Penthesilea, directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg in 1988 with actress Edith Clever.[8]
With the mural of a golden cross on black and violet ground—divided into pixels—Tonnis has been one of 36 international artists who designed the "Pixelkitchen" in January 2013, a tiled room of 177.2 inches height at the Günes Theatre in Frankfurt.[9] "All these artworks are glued, painted or nailed onto the walls."[10]
On June 20, 2021, Tonnis performed "Novalis" as a live stream at the Eulengasse exhibition space. In his glowing hand he held a bouquet of blue flowers and used them to write two passages from Novalis' novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen on a large scale horizon. The inscription of a poetic text from the early Romantic period is to be read “as an alternative to our swaying world that has gotten out of joint”.[11][12]
Tonnis started to make videos in 2006. His subjects have included William S. Burroughs, Thomas Bernhard and the poet Georg Trakl. Alongside these works stand the video series of "Dreams", "Electrical Pictures", and animals—exhibiting a pop, surreal pictorial language, often humorously staged.
Since 2009 Tonnis produced 133 short documentaries about art projects, exhibition setups, openings and interviews for the Kunstverein Familie Montez.[14] Of these, 16 works from December 2020[15] show the process of creating an 18 × 3.25 meter mural that was created by more than 40 artists in the joint project "Ein ganz normaler Herbst, nur anders ... 2020" ("A completely normal autumn, just different ... 2020).[16] The short documentaries go together with a "Family Album", created out of video stills.[17]
Solo exhibitions (selection)
1986: Zeichnungen, Galerie Das Bilderhaus, Frankfurt
2009: Gut ist was gefällt, Kunstverein Familie Montez, Frankfurt
2010: 2009 Was A Rough Year – Lilly McElroy, Thomas Robertello Gallery, Chicago
2012: Terremoto – Beben, by Nikolaus A. Nessler, in collaboration with Christiaan Tonnis (Film), Nico Rocznik (Light) and Manuel Stein (Sound), Kunsthaus Wiesbaden[18][19]
2013: Wurzeln weit mehr Aufmerksamkeit widmen, Kunstverein Familie Montez and Der Laden/Bauhaus University, Weimar
2011: Schamanismus aus dem Großen Altai, Kunstverein Eulengasse, Frankfurt[28]
2011: Meg Cebula. Geheimnis und Schönheit, Kunstverein Eulengasse, Frankfurt[29][30]
Bibliography
Christiaan Tonnis: Krankheit als Symbol, Berlin Pro Business, 1. Edition 2006-11-03, 2006, ISBN978-3-939533-34-4
Christiaan Tonnis, Oswald-von-Nell-Breuning-Schule and the town of Rödermark: 5+5=1!, DVD-Video (25 min.), 2011, archived at the town of Rödermark
ROT – Das Magazin des Kunstvereins Eulengasse, Axel Dielmann-Verlag, Frankfurt, 2013, p. 15-16, 145, 148-149, 15, ISBN978-3-86638-180-3
Kerstin Krone-Bayer and Hanna Rut Neidhardt (Publishers): Montez im Exil – Kunstverein Familie Montez, Frankfurt, 2014, ISBN978-3-00-045918-4
Familie Hecht – Eine Erinnerung, 2017, DVD-Video, in collaboration with the Oswald-von-Nell-Breuning-School, Rödermark, archived at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt
