You can wrap a riddle inside a mystery and stuff it up an enigma, but chances are that you still won’t attain the levels of postmodern, self-referential impenetrability that German conceptualist Michael Riedel hits. His first London show has so many reappropriated ideas and conceptual knots that at points it feels like you’re walking through the punchline to a joke about contemporary art.
The ground floor is filled with black-and-white posters, flyers and documentation from Riedel’s Frankfurt art space, Oskar-von-Miller Strasse 16 (open from 2000 to 2011). Riedel saw the gallery as a ‘replication device’ where the act of copying something was a work of art in itself. The gallery staged exhibitions where they recreated other exhibitions and events, and this is an exhibition about that. So it’s an exhibition about exhibitions about exhibitions. You following? And yes, it’s as boring and haughtily intellectual as it sounds. Riedel is basically treating his work as a subject of historical importance. It’s so self-aggrandising that he could have achieved the same effect by showing a giant picture of his own penis adorned with a crown.
The paintings upstairs are a revelation, though, because they aren’t just clever, they’re really quite beautiful. In stark black and white, the canvases look like screenshots of mid-glitch computer screens. Chunks of text and HTML code stutter across the surface while pixelated blocks of solid black ink splinter and judder over everything, creating solid, prettily geometric compositions.
Riedel’s name appears throughout – he may be something of an egomaniac – as do the same chunks of distorted gallery texts. He’s used the techniques of sampling and reappropriating to create paintings that are at once conceptually dense and visually impressive. If you don’t mind a bit of uni-level theorising and can stomach the idea of an artist who’s really, really into themselves – and we all love Picasso, right? – you might just like some of this.
Eddy Frankel