Ready (to be) made
While several generations apart, the work of Dutch Bas Jan Ader who was born in 1942 and emigrated to California in 1963, collides with that Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, two Swiss artists born in 1979 and now living in Berlin.
« Both hover between the Old World and the New. Both activate the "readymade" substance of an object or a body placed before a photographic lens or a movie camera. Both simultaneously convey the cold nature of conceptual art and the absurdity of burlesque comedy. Both seek harmony and find it using a paucity of means.
Both deliberately provoke the "accidentally true".
Of course, one falls whereas the others erect. And the gravity in the films of one finds its counterpoint in the facetious frivolity of the others. The remorseless logic of the dramatic "climax" of Bas Jan Ader's films is echoed by the repeated serendipitous occurrences in the work of Onorato and Krebs.
Yet in both cases, the very fragility of an act reveals its existential nature. An act that questions rather than condemns, that experiences the world rather than explaining it. »
-Diane Dufour
The exhibition received the support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and Prohelvetia.
The entire team is thankful to : Aargauer Kunsthaus (Aarau), the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, the RaebervonStenglin (Zurich) and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam).
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