Bildstein|Glatz

March 15, 2008 – May 3, 2008

WIDMER+THEODORIDIS contemporary is delighted to present the artist duo BILDSTEIN|GLATZ for the second time. Matthias Bildstein and Philippe Glatz will present excerpts from photographic editions they have produced since their last exhibition ‘72 Shots’, beginning with the series ‘Frisch in Wien’, works from the ‘Dokumenta 12’ series and new interventions in public spaces.

Between hip-hop, graffiti, street art and photography lays the origin of their collaboration. For several years now, the two young artists have been involved in various projects as a duo or together with other artists in collectives. Their work and methods mirror the present trend of seeing art as a social process, which can be lived out on various levels.

In the artist’s group Background Boys, BILDSTEIN|GLATZ jam on canvases together with three other colleagues on a regular basis, creating art in a concept-cum-jackass fashion. The work presented at last year’s art fair 'Art Bodensee’ in Dornbirn, was simultaneously created, sold modularly and thus deconstructed.

Politically motivated actionism, happening and fluxus are just several terms that can be associated with the artistic practices of BILDSTEIN|GLATZ, they are, however, appropriately founded in the street art and urban art of the metropolises. The shifting understanding of what is private and what is public and that which is perceived as such, is crystallised in cities. The constant loss of public space, the privatisation of railway stations and squares, the development of apparently public yet altogether privately controlled spaces such as shopping malls, increasingly calls into question the understanding of public space as state-run space.

Areas of public life believed to be lost are partly recaptured or occupied in a kind of wild, democratic process, be it in the form of squatting, graffiti or territory marking by street gangs. In the microcosm of a metropolis, it is the individual who decides what the neighbourhood looks like.

BILDSTEIN|GLATZ take this energy and push memorials in a humorous manner from their intended place, occupy temples of art or conduct clingfilm happenings on the subway in the finest Duchamp-Christo tradition. With spam-mehl.com, they guide the visitor with a wink and a nudge in the wide world and into an almost endless, almost Dadaesque loop.