Texts

Michael Riedel is known as the system analyst of art, among other things. He has made the art system his system of art. At the core of his work is repetition, the basic principle of any functioning system. However, his primary interest is not duplication, that is, the result of repetition, but translation from one to the next, and the changes and differences that are created by translation.

Always Different, Always the Same (2018)

Catalog Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur

Repetition, replication, displacement. This German artist is giving rise to a quasi world of distorted mirror-images and new takes on things that we already know, or so we thought.

Artforum (2004)

Riedels Arbeit besteht zu weiten Teilen darin, Prozesse zu erdenken, welche die vorgefundenen Objekte, Bilder, Texte oder Laute einer ergebnisoffenen Transformation und formalen wie inhaltlichen Verselbständigung anheimgeben.

Ohne Titel (Museum) (2020)

Catalog Saarlandmuseum, Moderne Galerie

This is where Riedel came in. ‘We needed a process which turned everything upside down and made the political process visible, instead of making an architecture that contains and closes the process off from the visitor,’ says Kuehn.

Wallpaper* (2017)

Aus Texten und Schriftbildern generiert er autonome Formen, Muster und Strukturen, die er auf Bildträger aller Art, auf Leinwände, Plakate, Ausstellungswände, ja ganze Räume oder Gebäudetrakte aufbringt.

Ohne Titel (Museum) (2020)

Catalog Saarlandmuseum, Moderne Galerie

It is no longer about critique, about theory or about justified verdicts made from a level of reflection holding itself at an observer’s distance to the art establishment. Nor is it about specific phenomena. Instead, it is about performative self-contradiction and deconstruction retroacting on itself.

CV (2017)

Catalog Kunsthalle Zürich

Having lived for a decade in the same German city as Riedel, I’ve been continuously drawn into his world of echoes and replicas, and will be surprised if I don’t detect inverted and displaced versions of artworks, exhibitions, and texts by friends (or myself) in his upcoming show.

Artforum (2017)

“There’s no content being produced, because I’m in the first generation that grew up digital,” Riedel replied, “we are just transferring all the time: tape, CDs and now the clouds.” He paused for a moment before continuing. “The self-reference is because I am the system. The technique is mainly carrying something from here to there, sometimes with a car, sometimes by making a recording. . . .” And sometimes, as with the new HTML paintings, with the click of a mouse.

The New York Times Magazine (2012)

Riedel begins his painting process by producing a palette: This palette corresponds to the system that produces possibilities. His palette of 34 posters which, arranged in different variations, represent his Poster Paintings are print-outs of websites that have communicated about his art online.

CV (2017)

Catalog Kunsthalle Zürich

Quarter- and semi-circles on the posters serve as structuring aids when assembling the multiple posters on the canvas while simultaneously visualising the moment announced by a little turning wheel on a computer screen when its operating system is ‘busy’, when the computer temporarily enters a state of non-function or locks up.

CV (2017)

Catalog Kunsthalle Zürich

As Riedel puts it, glossing Luhmann, "Each system needs a good container." For his 2011 installation The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog at David Zwirner Gallery in New York, Riedel activated the physical enclosure of the gallery, first by plastering its interior surfaces with wallpaper printed with text cut and pasted from the gallery’s website. Riedel then affixed a series of silkscreened „poster paintings“ on top of this wallpaper.

The Organic Line: Toward a Topology of Modernism (2024)

Eine Weiterführung der Poster Paintings sind die PowerPoint Paintings. Sie bilden Übergänge – oder auch Lücken – zwischen jeweils zwei existierenden Poster Paintings ab.

Kunste zur Text (2012)

Catalog Schirn Kunsthalle

Damit hat Riedel zwar die Übergänge zwischen zwei Poster Paintings abgedeckt, aber zugleich neue Lücken zwischen den PowerPoint Paintings geschaffen, wodurch letztlich das Gemachte und das Nicht-Gemachte im Werk zusammenfällt.

Kunste zur Text (2012)

Catalog Schirn Kunsthalle

Im Gegensatz zu den Poster Paintings, auf denen Kunstkritik zum Ausgangspunkt von Kunst wird, versteht Riedel die Wabenplatten eher als Infotafeln, bei denen er allerdings durch Layout und serielle Anordnung ebenso wie bei den Poster Paintings das Lesbare zugunsten des Bildhaften verschwinden lässt und die Informationen in den Zustand reiner Grafik versetzt, ja die Grafik als Event zelebriert.

Kunste zur Text (2012)

Catalog Schirn Kunsthalle

The liberation of that which serves a purpose defines the elevation of graphic material to art material. For Michael Riedel, it is crucial that his designed advertising, informational, and communicative means, such as posters, invitations, publications, and PowerPoint presentations—as applied graphic arts—do not constitute art at first. Only when they are transformed into art material do they become a component of works of free art.

Grafik als Ereignis (2018)

Catalog Museum Angewandte Kunst

Continuing his previous work on sculptures, posters, walls, windows, and floors, Riedel sets text in opposition to image to create a gamelike, nearly wordless art of signs.

Artforum (2008)

For his three-tiered exhibition series at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2013–15), he used multiple hours of sound recordings of the dismantling process of large museum shows. The resulting text produced by the software took the place of an exhibition and was presented in the form of a room-filling installation.

CV (2017)

Catalog Kunsthalle Zürich

Ces sons produits pendant l'emballage des oeuvres d'art sont transformés par l'artiste via un programme de reconnaissance vocale. Dans cette installation immersive, le texte recouvre le sol et les murs et sert de cadre à la fois graphique et architectural à des éléments de scénographie provenant du Städel Museum. Ces supports - socles et vitrines -, vidés de leurs contenus, deviennent ici des oeuvres à part entière.

Le Quotidien de l’Art (2014)

After a good thirteen years of collaboration, Michael Riedel draws a line under his work with his New York gallery and publishes their email correspondence spanning the period from 2004 to 2017 (preserved as EMLX files) in the form of banknotes.

Abstract (2022)

Artist's book

One of these works is his own currency, the riedel. Visitors can exchange euros for riedels at a one-to-one exchange rate or withdraw riedels from a cash machine installed for this purpose and use the riedels to buy a work of art. In this way, Riedel created a closed economic microcosm that emulates the mechanisms of the thriving art market and simultaneously reveals the absurdity of it. His system is not about speculative profit; it is about the critical reflection of value.

"Form Matters, Matter Forms". From Readymade to Product Fetish (2024)

Catalog Kunst Museum Winterthur

In the face of technological and social perspectives such as driverless cars and block-chain formations, Michael Riedel’s oeuvre asks, not least, the question of artistic production in the circle of artificial intelligences.

Grafik als Ereignis (2018)

Catalog Museum Angewandte Kunst

The strategies Michael Riedel has developed to expand the creative subject by means of systemic self-development produce new perspectives on the relationship of art, creativity, and life.

Grafik als Ereignis (2018)

Catalog Museum Angewandte Kunst

His pieces succeed in capturing the minimal, offering “little”—or perhaps even “nothing”—in heightened form.

Artforum (2008)