Eclectic Affinities. Hamid Zénati and the Collection of the Museum Angewandte Kunst

Eclectic Affinities brings the extensive work of the artist Hamid Zénati into dialogue with various objects from the collection of the Museum Angewandte Kunst. With his all-over stencil technique, Zénati developed a distinct formal language and created compositions that were both playful and powerful. His paintings on textiles, ceramics, and furniture, as well as his approach to photography, challenge established boundaries and genres by moving between the realms of design, art, and interior design.

Hamid Zénati was born in Constantine, Algeria, in 1944 and studied translation and photography in Munich after a brief stint as a teacher. In the 1970s, he worked as a translator and self-taught artist in Algiers. Facing political challenges in both Algeria and Germany, he split his time between the two countries. During his 60-year artistic career, he created over a thousand pieces.

Zénati’s work resonates with the museum’s central questions: What is applied art today? Where does the dividing line to fine art run? Do our learned hierarchies, categories of knowledge, and viewing habits do justice to a diverse world? Hamid Zénati was inspired by a wide variety of subjects, cultures, art movements, techniques, and media. His everyday life in Munich, his second home since the 1960s, influenced him as much as his travels through the Algerian desert, India, Indonesia, and Cuba. His works, which he always carried with him in suitcases so that he could work anywhere during his journeys, are the expression of a traveler between worlds, an artist who strove for freedom his entire life.

In nine chapters the exhibition focuses on different aspects, enabling a new perspective on the practice of an individualist and autodidact whose observations of social, cultural, and artistic movements organically flowed into his work. It also elicits unconventional approaches to the objects in the collection of the Museum Angewandte Kunst selected by the curators with reference to Zénati’s work. Loans from the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art and the Walther Collection in Neu-Ulm and New York create further points of reference.

Curators: Dr. Mahret Ifeoma Kupka, Anna Schneider
Director: Matthias Wagner K
Press contact: Natali-Lina Pitzer, T +49 (0)69 212 75339