NEW YORK, NY.- Born in Amsterdam in 1963, Raedecker, whose career began in fashion over four decades ago, uses his enigmatic and dream-like paintings to record memories held within spaces and objects. Through depictions of shadowy cabins, abandoned pools, tree houses, lonely suburban homes, and vacant parked cars with doors ajar, Raedecker’s unpeopled landscapes glow in eerie monochromes, summoning a certain unsettling familiarity within its viewer.
A fierce art history student and an avid rejector of tradition, in his own words, Raedecker seeks to “fight the commonly held ideas of fine art, I wanted to kick against it and make something unholy.” The spaces he conjures are recognizable yet simultaneously unidentifiable. He uses his painting language to build the idea that the interiors of a home can be an analogy for the human psyche: our inner life. As such, a kind of duality is created in which the commonplace objects and locations we know become suddenly unknowable.
Michael Raedecker features three notable essays by art writer and curator Laura McLean-Ferris, writer and critic Martin Herbert, british painter and writer Stuart Cumberland, and art historian and professor of early modern art at Washington University Claudia Swan. Kate Zambreno, American novelist, essayist, critic, and professor at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College, also contributed a never-before-seen fictional short story, Inertia, based on Raedecker’s latest works shown in New York at GRIMM Gallery. McLean-Ferris focuses on Raedecker’s transfer technique; Herbert traces his work over the years; Cubmerland analyzes Raedecker’s painting language; and Swan compares Raedecker’s work to that of Hercules Segers, the 16th century Dutch painter and printmaker. Additionally, visual artist John Chilver interviews Raedecker, which appears midway through the monograph and appropriately bisects its narrative.
Raedecker is an artist who defies categorization. As contributing writer Martin Herbert notes, “Take his signature use of thread, which has a tempting biographical ‘explanation’ (and how we love, especially nowadays, to filter artists’ practices through their lives): before he went to art school, Raedecker studied fashion and worked for the Belgian designer Martin Margiela. But he has noted that stitching into canvas, for him, had nothing to do with his former profession, and rather the unusual technique was initially a way to answer the question, ‘what can I add to the history of art?’”
The book will publish in July 2023 in anticipation of a major headliner retrospective of his work at the Kunstmuseum in the Hague, Netherlands, in February 2024.
The book is designed by acclaimed Dutch graphic designer Irma Boom, the oft-described “Queen of Books” reputed for her artistic autonomy within her field. A Phaidon exclusive limited edition will also be available upon publication. The limited-edition, Raedecker’s 2022 painting night at day, will be the same as the original, but each special edition of only 10 will be adorned with one-of-a-kind hand crafted thread embroidery by Raedecker himself.
Michael Raedecker celebrates its title figure as never before, recording three decades of imagery and creation. Fans and new-comers alike will marvel at such a rare artist, whose subject matter is as elusive as his medium.
“I want a fullness, I want people to feel something. I’m interested in images and how we look. Because there is always the picture that you are looking at versus its materiality. And what to paint is perhaps not so important for me. It’s more, how to make a painting.” -Michael Raedecker
