Michael Riedel: The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog

Kunstverein Hamburg

Artist Michael Riedel has a reputation for replicas, recreations, and facsimiles. From when he first drew international attention for his work in cooperation with Dennis Loesch at Oskar-von-Miller Strasse in Frankfurt, where the two duplicated artworks on view in local institutions, text, images, and even architectural components have all been fair game in the building of Riedel’s language of appropriation.

For an artist known for appropriation, even references to his own previous works can take on the meaning of a facsimile. In his exhibition The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog (the title itself an appropriation of a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet and used to display typefaces), Riedel references his installation at the 2007 Lyon Biennale in which he “doubled” the entrance to Rirkrit Tiravanija’s video program by modifying the entrance to the exhibition with a further entrance. Within this created “space within a space” Riedel presents 10 new works that take their references from the “non-space” of the internet, using material from both a website that features one of his works in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art New York and one that lists art highlights in the next 30 days. Should one still feel as if some element of appropriation were missing from the exhibition, the works produced mirror the forms of constructivism.

In addition to other works on display at the Kunstverein, Riedel’s Filmed Film Trailer, in which around 90 hours of filmed screenings of films are condensed to around 7 minutes, will be shown before all regular screenings at Metropolis Kino (Steindamm 54, 20099 Hamburg) for the duration of the exhibition.

July 10 – August 8, 2010 at Hamburg Kunstverein, Klosterwall 23, 20095 Hamburg

Get your freak on at East Hotel, it’s not a copy of anything.

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Categories: Hamburg, Art

Contributing writer: Melissa Frost