Bonniers Konsthall

Michael Beutler
February 14 - April 6, 2008

Torsgatan 19, S-113 90 Stockholm
Phone: +46 8 736 42 48
info@bonnierskonsthall.se

http://www.bonnierskonsthall.se

Bonniers Konsthall presents the hitherto most extensive solo exhibition with the German artist Michael Beutler. Michael Beutler is this spring’s guest artist at Bonniers Konsthall and has been invited to work on site in the studio. Michael Beutler has been commissioned by Bonniers Konsthall to create new works that take the architecture of the building as their starting point.

Michael Beutler is the third guest artist at Bonniers Konsthall, after Gabriel Lester and Monica Bonvicini. The 31-year-old Berlin artist has transformed the gallery’s main space into his studio, where he has produced his hitherto most extensive solo exhibition. Michael Beutler has created new works that take the architecture of the building as their starting point. Using improvisation and detailed planning in equal measures, he has, in collaboration with students of The Royal University College of Fine Arts, created a forest of pillars, made out of cardboard and wire, covered with paper selected by the art students.

In conjunction with the new works, Bonniers Konsthall presents a selection of Beutler’s earlier pieces; hand-built machines that are both art makers and artworks in themselves. They are ingenious machines, handmade implements with very specific purposes: one corrugates paper; another stretches plastic into large volumes; a third uses glue and cardboard to form large rings that are then stacked on top of one another. In the Konsthall’s entrance hall a machine puts household aluminium through a mangle to produce long, winding pathways that cover the floor, and which are subsequently ripped to shreds by the visitors’ feet during the course of the exhibition. Every few weeks one of the machines will be turned on, creating a new work that will then be added to the exhibition.

For each machine the artist has made a set of operating manuals that can be seen on the walls of the space. Here we find humorous, almost affectionate, instructions on how the artwork is to be used. The artist steps back and leaves the final form of the artwork open.

Beutler’s works exist in an explicit art-historical context, filled with references to modernism, minimalism and classical architecture. In his art, the industrial and the repeated are combined with handmade uniqueness and of what is improvised in the present moment. The use and transformation of industrially manufactured building materials is a major strand running through Beutler’s work. Through the recycling of our culture’s utility products and by seeing possibilities in unexpected materials, he creates entire new worlds.

Born in Germany in 1976, Michael Beutler is based in Berlin. He was educated at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and at Glasgow School of Fine Art. Beutler’s works were most recently shown at Portikus in Frankfurt and at the Museum Folkwang in Essen. He has participated in major international art biennials, including the 2005 Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, the 2005 Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, and the 2006
Gwangju Biennale.

A catalogue with texts by Polly Staple (curator and writer), Kim Einarsson (freelance curator) and Sara Arrhenius (director of Bonniers Konsthall) will be published in conjunction with the exhibition.