Hans Dickel

Exhibitions of contemporary art have always confounded their viewers. By showing works that justifiably claim 'contemporaneity', they challenge us to rethink the traditional expectations of art. Hans Dickel presents the rapidly changing concepts of art since 1900 in their philosophical and socio-historical context. Using relevant art-theoretical source texts, the respective innovations in the concept of art are elucidated chronologically. The publication’s descriptions and analyses make it well-suited to all those interested in art. By characterising the various definitions of contemporary art, the aim is to reveal the diversity of artistic production and changing trends during the 20th and 21st centuries.

In conversations and interviews Joseph Beuys mentioned Marcel Duchamp more than any other artist. And hardly anyone else seems to have challenged him more than this artist from the previous generation. Direct evidence of this is his oft-cited action Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet (The Silence of Marcel Duchamp is Overrated) from 1964, through which Beuys attempted to shift focus onto the political and social dimensions of his concept of expanded art. The associations and connections between the artists go deep. Both used similar radical strategies to rejuvenate the concept of art and the role of art in everyday life; their questions had a number of aspects in common. This richly illustrated catalogue is the first to undertake a profound exploration of this multilayered relationship, while investigating both artists’ future-oriented potential.

It has only just been reported that Marcel Odenbach (*1953) will be awarded the 2021 Wolfgang Hahn Prize. The small and memorable catalog published on the occasion of the current exhibition at Kunsthalle Nuremberg arrives just at the right time to illustrate the reason behind the choice of this award-winner: for quite a number of years now, the Cologne-based artist has been less interested in his own impact, but rather in his surroundings and his contemporaries. With his drawings, collages, videos, and installations, he ­explores questions of identity in the context of ­sexual orientation, class, and gender. Odenbach forms works that, owing to their experimental form and theoretical background, focus just as much on historical connections between colonialism and globalization as on the power of the normative and of representation. Since the mid-1970s, Marcel Odenbach has developed his pictorial language in montages and cross-fades of film and television recordings, archive material, as well as his own images and film sequences. Alongside the video works, he has always prepared drawings in the planning of video installations, which also work as independent image-text composi­tion.