KARLSRUHE.- Badischer Kunstverein is presenting the Stuttgart–based artist Michael Dreyer in the most comprehensive solo exhibition to date. Gemeinschaftsarbeiten / Society Pieces features earlier works alongside a number of new ones created especially for this presentation. Michael Dreyer works in such diverse media as small-scale sculpture, painting, collage, performance, and film. He resists the categorizations of the art system, preferring instead a heterogeneous and productive multiplicity. With Dreyer, selfreferentiality constitutes both form and content; equally central are the principles of appropriation and amplification. His art is highly conceptual, but at the same time plays with a desire for emotional and aesthetic "appeal."

The exhibition at the Kunstverein involves a (formal) confrontation with various languages and aesthetics of political and so-called “committed” art. According to Dreyer, political art can be characterized as a "demonstrational" speech act, one that was still characterized in the 19th and 20th centuries by conviction, still communicated truths, exposed discourses of power and shaped values. The approximately 50 new works in this exhibition are preoccupied with a dialectic of social utopia and defective reality. Drawings alternate with collages and small-scale sculptures. At the center are to some extent large-format and multicolored ink drawings that form a series of monumental book titles. They represent a sub-canon or encyclopedia of literature and theory devoted to themes such as community and society, aid and self-aid, production and productivity, automation and destruction.

This objective and putatively simple pictorial language asserts itself in relation to other motifs as well, with gear wheels, eggs, and chicks referring allegorically to a utopia of "edenic animal coexistence" and by extension to a form of animal-machine peace. Placed in the same context is the chicken egg, which as an "a priori" of the commodity, is situated in a complex societal, cultural, and economic cycle of needs. These images clarify more than the political albeit economically utopian promise of sexual identification in the egg, designed to obviate the killing of the doomed male chicks: they envision a voluntarily agreed-upon peace, a "peaceable eggplant a go go". This motif brings Dreyer quite consciously in proximity to kitsch and clichés, but at the same time allows him again to negotiate the possibility of realizing ideas of harmony and crisis pictorially.

A social utopia on the threshold leading from the 19th to the 20th centuries was the "aid" addressed in the exhibition in its various facets. Here, the child as constitutively "in need of aid" is the subject of numerous works, for example the sculptures Child Destroying a Music Box (2016, referencing Peter Weiss' novel Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers), Child Pointing With a Crutch (2016, referencing R.W. Fassbinder’s film Chinesisches Roulette) and Frères et soeurs, s’imitant mutuellement (2017). In the new collages, finally, the subject becomes a theme, as Dreyer investigates a simple gesture by means of the photographic portrait: the connection between the gaze and the position of the hand. In his research, Dreyer has established that the subjective and autobiographical moment contained in the works of various authors and theoreticians can be elucidated quite concretely through the performative gesture of self-staging. At the same time, collage and montage are interrogated as traditional media of critique in modernism.

Against the background of the current crisis of humanity, democracy, and participation, Michael Dreyer addresses the question of how community can be negotiated in a utopian way, how individuals can support one another within a community, and what role ought to be attributed to political art in this context. In his reflections on the vocabularies, iconographies, and references of "committed art," he draws upon the various forms of their actual miscarriage. The crisis of political art can be traced to the moment when the field places itself at the service of high culture.

Curated by Anja Casser