The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presents Michael Riedel Kunste zur Text, an exhibition on view 16 June–9 September 2012.
Michael Riedel, Kunste zur Text (exhibition view), 2012. © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Photography: Norbert Miguletz.
Recording – labeling – playback. Frankfurt-based artist Michael Riedel has been investigating the issue of reproduction and repetition since his first performances in the context of the legendary art space Oskar-von-Miller-Straße 16, which he initiated at this address in Frankfurt in 2000. This was the venue of repetitions or copies of exhibitions, concerts, readings, club evenings, and of the Freitagsküche (Friday Kitchen), an event amidst art and life continued to this day. Riedel works with recorded conversations, films, performances, or other artists’ shows. His system of production is based on the combination of these elements into ever new variations and on the transformation of one medium into another. Through the process of transcription, for example, Riedel transfers voice recordings into the visual realm, defamiliarizing and expanding them with the help of technological means in order to ultimately reproduce them in a new variation or replay them. With Kunste zur Text, the Schirn Kunsthalle presents a first retrospective of Michael Riedel’s work.
Michael Riedel was born in Rüsselsheim in 1972. He lives and works in Frankfurt today, where he graduated from the Städel School in 2000. Relying on the principle of repetition, the artist is not concerned with the authentic reproduction of a certain event or content, but with the difference the transformation from one medium into the other entails. Riedel made a name for himself with his performances in the art space Oskar-von-Miller-Straße 16, where he, together with some of his friends, realized a manifold program comprising reenactments of installations, concerts, films, and club evenings—as repetitions of the original events, so to speak.
In his conceptual practice, Riedel relies on a wide variety of media and formats from works on canvas, film, video, and audio recordings to artist’s books, posters, installations, and events depending on the reference point of the work and the degree of its media transformation. He uses the strategy of recording, labeling, and playback. In Riedel’s work, a recording is by no means a one-to-one reproduction of a club evening or reading, but a copy containing all the recording equipment’s fluctuations in quality, all technical flaws. Rather than showing the mere achievement of the translation—such as of a given text into a new text—Michael Riedel’s works reveal the possibilities provided by often just minimal interventions into the extant material. The resultant works frequently serve as starting points for new ones.
Beginning with early and ending with quite recent works—from the publication Gedruckte und ungedruckte Poster (Printed and Unprinted Posters, 2003–2008) and the sequence of poster and PowerPoint paintings (2010– ), Vier Vorschläge zur Veränderung von Modern (Four Proposals for Changing Modern, 2007– ), and Frieze (CMYK) (2007) to Filmed Film Trailer (2008)—the exhibition at Schirn for the first time juxtaposes various of Riedel’s work series to form a new installation, which offers an insight into the artist’s manifold production methods. The principle of repetition recurs in the architecture of Kunste zur Text. Riedel uses the walls of the previous show, Edvard Munch. The Modern Eye as a projection surface for his own presentation.
Solo exhibitions of Michael Riedel’s work have been shown at the Galerie Gabriele Senn, Vienna (2001); in the Kunstverein Hamburg (2010); the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main (2008); the Kunstraum Innsbruck (2007); as well as at the David Zwirner Gallery, New York (2005, 2008, 2011). The artist also presented his works in major group exhibitions in the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM) Torino (2010); and the Tate Modern, London (2009); at the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art (2007); and at the Moscow Biennial (2005); a.o.
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