Rineke Dijkstra
The Krazy House
February 23–May 26, 2013
Opening: Friday, 22 February, 8pm
MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst
Frankfurt am Main
Domstraße 10
60311 Frankfurt am Main
There has been a great deal of writing and speculation about Rineke Dijkstra’s relationship to art history and the Old Masters. Now the artist herself has her say. In her major exhibition at the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Rineke Dijkstra reveals artistic affinities, her sources of inspiration and key aspects of artistic creation. How firmly her work is anchored in the present—for all her fascination with the Old Masters—is evident from the choice of works by contemporary artists that she has made for the exhibition in order to present them in a dialog with her own works. The MMK Collection, which comprises more than five thousand objects, paintings, installations and photographs ranging in date from the 1960s to the present day, has provided both the starting point and the point of crystallization for this.
With Rineke Dijkstra. The Krazy House, the MMK is staging the most comprehensive exhibition of the Dutch artist in Germany to date, setting one of today’s most important figures in the field of photographic and video art in the context of recent art history and contemporary artistic production. The exhibition brings together all of the video installations created by Dijkstra since 1996, two of which are receiving their world premiere here. The video works are supplemented by selected groups of photographic work that focus on the theme of young people growing up in a society shaped by conventions and codes. The exhibition highlight is Dijkstra’s large-scale four-channel video projection The Krazyhouse, filmed in 2009 in the Liverpool club bearing the same name: a portrait, as dynamic as it is moving, of five young people and how they express themselves through dance.
In addition, Dijkstra selected more than a hundred works by other artists from the MMK Collection, which she relates to her own works. Exploring both formal analogies and correspondences of content, she casts an artistic and subjective eye on contemporary art. As well as works from the MMK Collection by Andy Warhol, Douglas Gordon, Isa Genzken, Tobias Rehberger, On Kawara, Bruce Nauman and many others, a work by Pablo Picasso will also be on display at her request—the famous painting Weeping Woman, on loan from the Tate—which served as the point of departure for two of her recent video works.
Catalog
The exhibition catalog features an in-depth discussion between Rineke Dijkstra, the curator Peter Gorschlüter and art critic Hans den Hartog Jager, as well as numerous illustrations of works by the artist and from the MMK Collection.
Funded by Mondriaan Fund, Kingdom of the Netherlands, Freunde des MMK
Generously supported by Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin