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Through the Back Door to MoMA?

In his book OFFENES BUCH, sculptor and conceptual artist Ingo Gerken conducts visual dialogues with institutional book publications on contemporary art. The opened pages of museum catalogues, exhibition publications and art magazines are both the playing field and the object of investigation. The artist expands reproductions and photographs of works depicted in them through direct intervention and by adding the most banal objects in such a way that multidimensional shifts in meaning are created. The book in the book and the image of the image are reflected and is reflected, rebalanced and weighed beyond its actual context. Concepts of image, pictorial space, work, value, art (and not least reality) are circled in a border-crossing manner and thereby questioned for validity and relevance. Gerken‘s book interventions reveal themselves to us as a jingling bunch of keys with which even the most sacred rooms, corridors and halls of the art operating system become surprisingly easily accessible and enterable through a side entrance.

Wolfgang Ullrich has written a text on Gerken‘s working method in OFFENES BUCH and will discuss it again with the artist this evening. Ingo Gerken will comment on his approach and give a little insight into his work. Next spring, he will also present new works from this series at the Leipzig Book Fair in MZIN‘s bookstore in the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig. But only on the MASHUP Talk evening will the legendary musicians Franziska Hiller and Ilan Bendahan Bitton be heard.