Brooklyn Museum of Art

Jesper Just: Romantic Delusions

Press Release

This exhibition presents four films by the Danish filmmaker Jesper Just: No Man Is an Island (2002), Bliss and Heaven (2004), The Lonely Villa (2004), and a new film, Romantic Delusions (2008), to premiere in the U.S. at the Brooklyn Museum. Jesper Just’s films explore the complex nature of human interaction and often invert social conventions and cinematic clichés. His work has been shown extensively worldwide, both in galleries and museums, from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Jesper Just’s films explore the complexities and contradictions of human emotion. Using overlapping cinematic, musical, and literary references, his films adopt popular songs to communicate the vulnerability and insecurity in relationships. These short films, all under ten minutes, appropriate Hollywood’s polished production values but then deviate from the usual narrative story arc in favor of creating a film noir atmosphere rather than a resolved plot. His films comment on gender politics and the possibility of relationships across a generational divide, but more important, they present the broader existential search for identity.

Jesper Just was born in Copenhagen in 1974, and is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. His work is also in the collections of institutions such as the Tate in London, the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Jesper Just: Romantic Delusions is organized by the Brooklyn Museum.

The exhibition publication is made possible by the Perry Rubenstein Gallery.