Open: Wed-Sat 11am-6pm, Tue by appointment

2 Bourdon Street, W1K 3PA, London, United Kingdom
Open: Wed-Sat 11am-6pm, Tue by appointment

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Artist: Michael Raedecker

GRIMM presents a solo exhibition of new works by the London-based, Dutch artist Michael Raedecker (b. 1963, Amsterdam, NL). This is Raedecker’s first exhibition at the gallery’s recently-opened London space and his sixth solo exhibition with GRIMM.

Depicted throughout the exhibition are images and environments populated by the artist’s recurrent motifs - houses, swimming pools, forests, saloon cars, treehouses and caves - that possess the uncanny quality of being familiar, even comforting, and yet simultaneously isolating or threatening. Raedecker’s work is engaged with a process of re-contextualising and redefining these spaces, asking the viewer to look again at that which they think they know, lending them a disorienting quality. The spaces verge upon being hostile or even apocalyptic, dense with thread that conjures the sense of the overgrown, of nature recapturing and consuming the environment. With car doors left ajar, curtains drawn, spaces dimly lit and a complete absence of human figures, we enter into a landscape devoid of temporal or geographic specificity, left to speculate and reach for a tangible narrative that never arrives.

Raedecker begins by working out a composition on canvas with paint and thread. Once photographed, this initial sketch is discarded. The photographic image then becomes subject to digital manipulations in photo editing software, before being scaled up and transferred onto a new canvas by hand in multiple, standardised rectangular segments. This process reasserts the physical and human element into the mechanical reproduction of the digitised copy, causing areas of overlap and blurring. Raedecker finally works back over the composition with acrylic paint and most distinctly large areas of thread that give each work a sculpted surface, deploying craft techniques to disrupt the conceptual and pictorial harmony of the variously photographic and painted imagery.

In both their content and their form, these works engage with an act of deconstruction and reconfiguration. They disavow the distinction between media, of so called fine art and craft, drawing attention to competing surface qualities and the illusion of representation, revelling in areas of glitching abstraction as well as dense crocheted and beaded thread. Traversing the handmade and the mechanical, the analogue and digital, Raedecker collapses the original into the copy and back into to the original.

A major solo museum survey at the Kunstmuseum The Hague is forthcoming in Spring 2024, as well as a comprehensive publication on the work of Michael Raedecker from Phaidon, available June, 2023. This landmark catalogue spans his 30-year career, with contributions from Kate Zambreno, Laura McLean-Ferris, Martin Herbert, John Chilver, Stuart Cumberland and Claudia Swan.