The Rise and Fall of the Rise and Fall

The Kienzle Art Foundation is pleased to announce the Soloshow THE RISE AND FALL OF THE RISE AND FALL by Michael Franz on the occasion of this year’s Berlin Art Week.

The artistic practice of Michael Franz loosely ties on the strategies of Conceptual Art and Institutional Critique. A central point in the work is the reflection of its own position within any given exhibition context. By „simple“ means, the artist develops works which refer to the given interconnection between the common and the individual, between the generic and the specific. The use of digital techniques thereby stands equal footing with „classical“ artistic processes.

In addition to new works, some of which were specially designed for the exhibition, the Kienzle Art Foundation also features videos from the past four years. On the monitor in the first showroom, two films alternate: In +491631615759 (2015), you can see the artist’s telephone number build of candles, which burn slowly against the background of the footage of a traffic surveillance camera. Drive (2016) is based on the music video for the eponymous song of the American rock band R.E.M. From the online video documentation of a symposium at the Fridericianum in Kassel, the recordings of the audience were isolated and arranged according to the music and then edited.

The film Quantities (2019, room 3) shows the flight taken by a toy quadrocopter through the artist’s childhood home: through all rooms the camera follows countless objects which are spread out more or less systematically on the floors. The individual aspects to be read out of the personal belongings of the author immediately get lost in the generality of the cited references. These refer to average characteristics that arise from seemingly non-individual prerequisites such as class affiliation, history, family structure, temporal and spatial location, and so on.

New drawings, a series of posters, a wall paper and two large-format canvases continue the discussion around the questions initiated by the videos.

A publication has been printed on the occasion of this exhibition.

Michael Franz (*1974) lives and works in Vienna and Berlin. In recent years he has exhibited at the Neues Museum Nuremberg (2019), Galerie Lars Friedrich Berlin (2018) and Simultanhalle Köln (2016).

Related Event: The Rise And Fall of the Rise And Fall, February 16, 2020