BERLIN.- The American artist Allan McCollum (born in 1944 in Los Angeles) counts among the most important conceptual artists of our time. As one of the original roster of Berlin based Galerie Thomas Schulte, McCollum presents a new and charitable project titled Everything is Going to be OK.

The project draws on his comprehensive image archive, An Ongoing Collection of Screengrabs with Reassuring Subtitles, which currently comprises 1,200 screenshots from American TV series and movies. McCollum has selected 400 motifs from the archive which feature subtitles such as “It will be ok” or “Don’t worry, Babe” to be printed on canvas, each framed in a black wooden frame and measuring 10.4 x 17.2 x 1.6 in.

Each of these original prints is available for the net price of EUR 700 and can be purchased directly in the gallery's new online shop or in person at the gallery. 30% of the proceeds will benefit C/O Berlin and ICA Miami, where McCollum’s first comprehensive retrospective has been “on view” behind closed doors.

The show’s theme addresses the sense of uncertainty and despair that abounds during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Aesthetically, McCollum gives a message of optimism and reassurance an unmistakable and clear format. At the same time, the works reveal an undertone of irony that questions these formulaic expressions from Hollywood.

The exhibition Allan McCollum – Everything is Going to be OK is on view parallel to a group exhibition at the gallery showcasing works by Dieter Appelt, Angela de la Cruz, Paula Doepfner, Rebecca Horn, Alfredo Jaar, Maria Loboda, Michael Müller, Yoko Ono and Francesca Woodman. The featured artists use diverse media to articulate common themes of fragility and vulnerability, expressed through the material or subject matter.

Allan McCollum, born in Los Angeles in 1944, is an internationally acclaimed conceptual artist whose career began in the late 1960s. For most of us he is known as the creator of important series, such as Over Ten Thousand Individual Works, Plaster Surrogates, Perfect Vehicles, and The Shapes Project, which can be found in many museum collections, including MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco MoMA, Centre Pompidou, and various others around the world.

Questions of identity and the relationship between the individual and mass culture are at the heart of many of McCollum’s works. He has, over the span of his career, carried out numerous projects involving ordinary individuals and craftspeople across towns and communities in the US, taking a special interest in common, everyday life, popular culture, the aspect of the individual, and processes of mass production.