Andrea Rosen Gallery treats the viewer to yet another
Michael Raedecker exhibition—his fifth—at the gallery. Highlighting substantial
new developments in the Raedecker’s practice, this show anticipates an
important traveling mid-career survey show opening at the Wilhelm-Hack Museum
at the end of this year.
In a recent shift, Raedecker began cutting his painted
canvases apart and stitching the fragments back together to form new
compositions. The cut is disruptive and perverse: the rip becomes a repair and
the fragmented scene becomes newly reanimated. In his newest body of work,
Raedecker uses the intentional precision of this technique to interrogate our
sentimental attachment to highly recognizable yet generic symbols of the good
life: the suburban model home, the palm tree, the chandelier. These anonymous
objects, repeated and set adrift in gestural monochromatic fields of paint, are
placeholders for the whole history of the world, appearing and disappearing on
the surface of the paintings.
The initial familiarity of these scenes allows for our
personal investment in them, but the literal trace of the object, created by
the puncture of the needle and gauge of the thread, continues to pull us back
to the surface and to the painting itself as the object of extraordinary
investment and inquiry. For Raedecker the decorative façade of a house is
analogous to a painting – its flatness resists vision, reflecting instead the
viewer’s own desires and fears. The painting, like the façade or the almost
abstract filigree of a chandelier picked out in thread, is always a fragile
surface, its loose narratives caving in on themselves, turning upside down and
failing to resolve into known pictorial categories. This uncanny loop of
recognition and estrangement is intensified by the newest sutures, which
disrupt the integrity of the picture and memorialize the essential violence of
representation.
The title of the exhibition invokes the tour as a journey
undertaken for pleasure or inspection—a contemplative invitation to the viewer
with various way stations for connection, exchange and new perspectives. Raedecker’s enmeshed patterns spring from myriad
sources: film, the American landscape, spaghetti westerns, old cowboy flicks,
craft tradition, and nature’s various wonders—not to mention such human themes
as solitude, tranquility and emotional isolation. This, while the monochromatic
stillness of his compositions break down to the barest color-field essentials.
Michael Raedecker was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1963
and currently lives and works in London. He studied at the Rijksakademie van
Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (1993 – 1994), and at Goldsmiths College, London
(1996 – 1997). In 2000, Raedecker was shortlisted for the prestigious Turner
Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include volume at Hauser & Wirth, London
(2012); Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2010); and Line-Up which opened at Camden
Arts Centre, London, England (2009) and traveled to Gemeentemuseum Den Haag,
The Hague, Netherlands (2009) and Carré d’Art – Musée d'Art Contemporain de
Nîmes (2010).
Through October 5, 2013
525 West 24th Street, NYC 10011
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