 | Matts Leiderstam
| 60% visual arts
28% art history
12% subversion
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In a picture gallery it rarely occurs to you that everything could just as easily be hung quite differently. The museum and other institutions involved in constructing art history are hardly interested in this relativisation of their work. The consensus as to what is mastery and why is created chiefly by an ostensibly objective rhetoric that does not allow mistakes, misunderstandings or individual wishes to become visible.
The work of Swedish artist Matts Leiderstam, however, thrives on creating constant productive confusion in this canonical order. His methods are borrowed from the tools of the art historian: rehanging pictures, copying pictures, visualising the provenance of an art work, examining the history of a picture’s restoration, or enlarging and presenting isolated details of pictures ... Picture galleries, catalogues and libraries provide the source material for his work, with which he draws the viewers’ attention to the repressed sexual, personal and power-political subtexts of art works.
Video
Co-produced by steirischer herbst & Grazer Kunstverein
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