Artist: Thomas Baldischwyler
Exhibition title: An den Rand der Zukunft denken
Venue: Galerie Conradi, Hamburg, Germany
Date: February 9 – March 30, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galerie Conradi, Hamburg
Thomas Baldischwyler’s solo exhibition An den Rand der Zukunft denken opened in February at Galerie Conradi. In addition to the work group Rand, which was created in 2023, the exhibition shows a new video displayed on LED panels, a collage from the artists’ archive and a catalogue raisonné.
The future that Thomas Baldischwyler is trying to think at the edge of is not a speculative one. The materials and tools he has used to produce his recent works could not be more contemporary. In countless work steps, Baldischwyler collaged painted shipping cartons with a stapler, printed on them in several colours with an industrial hand printer and covered them with highly transparent PU varnish. The shadow-gap frames made of clear acrylic glass, make the actual working materials disappear in a shiny, smooth surface. Up close, these surfaces appear like revenants of the pointillist attempts at additive colour mixing of the late fin de siècle. From a distance, the objects look like tilted figures interspersed with digital glitches. Baldischwyler used the stapled seams of the clumsy cardboard geometries as interferers for the adjustment laser of the hand printer. As a result, the dead ends of the content (all cut from the history of sexual dichotomies from the world of cinema in the second half of the last century) are combined with faulty colour stripes, thus linking the aesthetics of early digitalization with contemporary false memory syndrome. – It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
Baldischwyler’s catalogue raisonné Doppelte Buchführung is a collection of 248 collages. It was created using b/w copies of the 2004 catalogue Formalism. Moderne Kunst, heute, which documented a group exhibition of the same year at the Kunstverein in Hamburg. His analogue reworking consists of a combination of different layers of history and stories. These include isometric grids borrowed from postmodern architecture, gestural watercolour painting and photographic prints and texts fixed with ephemeral-looking metal clamps. In this way, the fragments of the original that shimmer through become incidental foundations for the roughly added layers of his own working biography. This book, which Baldischwyler began producing during the first lockdown in 2020, was published by ADOCS-Verlag in Hamburg and has been released on the occasion of the exhibition.
Thomas Baldischwyler has been honoured with the Hamburg Edwin Scharff Prize and the Prize for Conceptual Strategies of the Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster, among others. He has also received numerous residency scholarships, such as the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo and the Laurenz-Haus Foundation in Basel. Baldischwyler studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, where he graduated in 2004 under Stephan Dillemuth. His work has been shown in numerous national and international institutions. He has been recently contributing a large room installation in the exhibition Atmen at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2023). In addition to his work as a visual artist, Baldischwyler regularly publishes sound recordings on vinyl under the label Travel By Goods.
