The press on the Artschwager Exhibition at the Wörlen Foundation

Richard Artschwager makes objects and images come unhinged: Yet in his work, drawing sculpture, and painting are independent genres that are nonetheless inherently connected in form and content. The fact that his work cannot be subsumed by any one single category has often given him the reputation of "Secretive" and "Puzzling".

His exhibition Up and Down / Back and Forth, which was shown at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin from the 10th of May to the 6th of July 2003, has now travelled to the Museum moderner Kunst - Wörlen Foundation in Passau. Here through February 1st, 2004, one can still see over 40 drawings, sculptures, pictures and multiples, created between 1965 and 2003.

Helmut Wagner prophesies some surprises in the Landshuter Zeitung: "If you think his black and white drawings are nothing more than sombre interiors, functionally designed seating arrangements, i.e., banal place settings, one suddenly notices they are rendered from the perspective of a cat, or that we are led into the realm of the surreal from one picture to the next. In other drawings, Artschwager leaves us utterly clueless: by showing us some potatoes on a slope where we can't see what the connection is because they look like rocks or threatening boulders."

Info sieben finds that , "Artschwager's pictures present banal things such as potatoes or a belt buckle, seducing the viewer to fabricate a complementary construct with its own context, but one that is so ambivalent, that one senses the self-deception, at least subliminally. 'What is this about?' and it's precisely this incensed irritation of the viewer over the imaginary mischief that enables this experiment to succeed."

Richard Artschwager: Up and Down / Back and Forth from 22 November 2003 to 1 February 2004 at the Museum moderner Kunst - Wörlen Foundation in Passau.

Translation: Carrie Asman