Exhibition
There is never a stop and never a finish. In memoriam Jason Rhoades
May 05, 2007 - August 19, 2007
To commemorate the recent untimely death of the American artist, Jason Rhoades, the Flick Collection presents an exhibition specifically focusing on the imagery of trash in art from the 1960s onwards. Besides a significant amount of works by Rhoades, the exhibition pays homage with installations, sculptures, paintings, photographs and graphic works by other artists featured in the collection; namely Dieter Roth, Otto Mühl, Paul McCarthy and Martin Kippenberger.
With their piles of plastic waste and other scrap materials, Roth, Daniel Spoerri, Isa Genzken, and Rhoades elevate our preconceived notion of ‘worthless’ rubbish into a realm of art. The "Materialaktionen" of Mühl and McCarthy, material-rich happenings, confront the spectator with "dirty" images which provoke repulsion and disgust at their crude viscerality. A trashy painting style and acrid irony are the weapons with which Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen battle against hollow pathos and "regressive" expressivity. All these artists, with Rhodes at the helm, move between the definition of form on the one hand, and its dissolution on the other. In doing so, they touch upon poignant questions of transience and the survival of civilization.