Faking the Real

Around the explosive term Fake, the exhibition at Kunsthaus Graz traces the development of the interfaces between graphic design, media images and art since 1971. With works by Rosemarie Trockel, Gerwald Rockenschaub and Signe Pierce, among others, it reflects both political upheavals and technological developments. Faking the Real explores the question of the manipulation of realities and reveals an evolution from posters in public space through to interventions in social media. The exhibition is part of the large-scale special show The Art of Enticement, which examines 100 years of graphic design and poster art from different perspectives. 

Especially in the last few decades, both graphic designers and artists have used the concepts and ideas of selling, manipulating and celebrating in parallel. They are more and more clearly influenced by each other—not just through appropriation, but in confident affirmation. Apart from material innovations, it is in particular technological innovations that are driving not only commercial graphics, but also art in its mirror. Digital layout programmes create almost endless possibilities for surface designs. Coming from collage, the first image editing programmes inspired pioneering positions in art such as John Baldessari to create smooth image montages and, from the 1980s onwards, spurred the first generation of digital artists, including Peter Kogler, Thomas Bayrle and Sylvia Eckermann, to create ever larger graphics, expanding spatially. Very current positions in art, such as Christiane Peschek and Hito Steyerl, who has a solo exhibition in Space01 at the Kunsthaus, not only interactively merge the analogue and digital worlds, but also produce their inseparable and invisible fusion. The question of the ‘applied’ as something covertly seductive, remote, calculated and manipulated by an invisible hand, is posed here once again in an entirely new way.

With works by Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, John Baldessari, Thomas Bayrle, Lynda Benglis, Gottfried Bechtold, Beni Bischof, Monica Bonvicini, BLESS, Boris Bućan, Daniele Buetti, Chris Burden, Teresa Burga, Judy Chicago, fierce pussy, Sylvie Fleury, Sylvia Eckermann, John Gerrard, Jochen Gerz, Manuel Gorkiewicz, G.R.A.M., Guerrilla Girls, Rachel Harrison, Thomas Hirschhorn, Robert Indiana, Johanna Jaskowska, Šejla Kamerić, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Peter Kogler, Isabella Kohlhuber, Brigitte Kowanz, Sonia Leimer, Otto Mittmannsgruber/Martin Strauss, Susan Mogul, Sarah Morris, museum in progress, ORLAN, Julian Opie, Christiane Peschek, Alli Coates und Signe Pierce, Pierre et Gilles, Sophie Reinhold, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Michael Schuster, Elfie Semotan, Cindy Shermann, Katharina Sieverding, Lucie Stahl, Hito Steyerl, Sturtevant, Total Refusal, Jochen Traar, Rosemarie Trockel, Piotr Uklanski, Amalia Ulman, Maja Vukoje, Peter Weibel, Bernhard Wolf, Christopher Wool, Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, Dragana Žarevac, Heimo Zobernig and others, and an overview of 50 years of poster development at steirischer herbst. 

In the framework of steirischer herbst ’22.