Ridiculously Yours!

One of the most important attitudes or feelings underlying modern and contemporary art is an enthusiastic awkwardness that does not shy away from the embarrassing, the unreasonably silly: seriously?!

The cross-epoch exhibition includes works by around 100 artists from all over the world and spans an arc from earlier centuries of art-making to the immediate present. In modernism since the 19th century in general and the classical avant-gardes of the early 20th century in particular, a very specific dialectic is at work: on the one hand, bold innovations, radical negation and aesthetic dogmas—but on the other, a certain kind of laughter that formed the basis for the creation of this exhibition project. It is a laughter that is fun and at the same time—without only wanting to scandalise—undermines all conservatism, bigotry, moral concepts and not least avant-garde dogmatisms. By opposing the use of culture to intimidate, to secure unearned privileges, this laughter shows how authority loses its grip, how the pompous gesture and the image of the hero are invalidated.

Works by numerous important artists are represented in a scenography containing different chapters—from Pieter Bruegel the Elder to Alfred Jarry and James Ensor, Marcel Duchamp and and Francis Picabia, George Grosz and René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico and Sturtevant, Sigmar Polke and Martin Kippenberger to numerous contemporary positions, as for example Paul McCarthy, Nicole Eisenman, Fischli & Weiss, Isa Genzken, Pauline Curnier-Jardin, Kiluanji Kia Henda or Ming Wong. Ridiculously Yours! flirts with the humour of catastrophe, bad taste, the camp approach, B-movie culture, science fiction, horror, etc., as well as immaturity, idiocy, intuition and, of course, passion—not to mention enthusiasm.

This exhibition project has been initiated and conceived by Jörg Heiser and Cristina Ricupero.

Bundeskunsthalle
Director: Eva Kraus
Curators: Jörg Heiser, Cristina Ricupero
Press officer: Sven Bergmann, kommunikation@bundeskunsthalle.de

Also on view
Opera is Dead: Long Live Opera!
Until February 5,  2023

Coming soon
The Last of Their Kind: Crafts and Professions in Transition
December 3, 2022 to April 2, 2023