Archive / 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.

Since the early 1970s, the Swiss artist Roman Signer has carried out performances involving everyday objects such as tables, barrels, balloons, bicycles, or kajaks. In carefully meditated and laid-out arrangements, these objects meet with the chosen elements of water, earth, air, and fire. Over the years, Signer has thus created a multifaceted oeuvre of "time sculptures," which take on a variety of different manifestations and forms.

The Flick Collection’s extensive presentation of Signer’s work includes numerous objects, drawings, photographs and films by the artist, including the documentation of Signer’ installing an artificial volcano at the landscape park of Wörlitz in the summer of 2007.

Parralel with this monographic exhibition on Signer, the exhibition currently on display in the Rieckhallen focuses on artists from the West Coast of America, including Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, and Jason Rhoades.

Wherever we go, we are constantly surrounded by moving images. In a sphere of art, such images have increasingly developed a life of their own: existing "beyond the cinema," where the convention of viewing film in dark auditoriums is consistently undermined. Now, images project themselves freely onto walls, are set side by side in multiple projections, are arranged as walk-in installations and are conceived as stagings in specially-designed architectures.

‘Beyond Cinema,’ the latest thematic exhibition from the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, focuses on major film and video installations of the 1990s and their historical precedents.  Amongst others, it features the ravishing projections of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, Bruce Nauman's existentialist image of the body, the psychologically-charged film spaces of Eija-Liisa Ahtila and the highly conceptual installations of Canadian artist Rodney Graham. These contemporary forages into the world of cinema exemplify both the artistic and theoretical debates which surrounded the development of the projected image during the 1960s. Groundbreaking works, such as the films of Marcel Broodthaers, Dan Graham and the experimental filmmaker Valie Export, can be viewed in dialogue with the more contemporary works from the Collection’s extensive archives.

With thematic sections such as "Phantasmagoria", "Body Double" and "Repertory Cinema", the Flick Collection’s latest exhibition outlines the significant movement of the projected image to a realm outside the traditional cinematic space. At the same time, it demonstrates how subject matter, techniques and conceptual notions have shaped this form of media art to the present day. Ultimately, ‘The Art of Projection’ is a school of perception, offering an extraordinary experience of filmic effects - such as light, shadow, motion, sound and reflection - to its contemporary audience.

Parallel to the exhibition, Kino Arsenal will screen films, and a scholarly symposium will be held.