After 35 years, Christine König starts a new chapter and is opening an additional location:

THE PICTURE AND ITS BOOK: Two forms of narration, two forms of perceiving the world. While the viewer of an artwork is mostly overwhelmed with an abundance of information, the book invites contemplation. The interplay of these two aesthetic dispositives enables the connection between time and space. In this way, the traditional format of “exhibition” is raised above itself. But it is not only about books that influence artists and their works, it also may refer to single words that literally wander into the picture. Joseph Kosuth for example, took over individual terms from Thomas Bernhard’s novel “Correction” and transformed them into a light installation corresponding to the area of the printed page.

THE PICTURE AND ITS BOOK thereby unfolds a “Glasperlenspiel” that manifests itself on a variety of levels. “Reading means dreaming through hands of a stranger”, Fernando Pessoa once wrote. One could also reverse the formulation: “dreaming while observing art, means reading through hands of a stranger”. (Thomas Miessgang, 2024)

OPENING EXHIBITION:

MICHAEL RIEDEL
THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS (A-Z)

The work “Die Traumdeutung (A-Z)” [“The Interpretation of Dreams (A-Z)”] created by Michael Riedel for the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt am Main dismantles the narrative consistency of the famous work by Sigmund Freud and, instead, alphabetically lists all words with the same initial letter – the artist himself speaks contradictorily of “unformulated formulation”. The newly arranged language elements form image areas that explicitly should not represent emblems from the “interpretation of dreams”, but should develop their own visual intrinsic value – absolutely in a conceptual connection to the language-critical text assemblages of the Wiener Gruppe in the 1950s, or even to the surface works of the Wiener Werkstätten. In this manner, one of the most well-known works of Sigmund Freud is (re)turned into a pre-narrative state. The fact that, in this process, the basis for new potentials for formulations is produced is the point of a work that makes repression and the unconscious come alive again in a completely different way. (Thomas Miessgang, 2024)