Lamps, furniture, bicycles, letter presses, museum pedestals: Mathieu Mercier's artistic output moves back and forth in a masterly manner between the categories of art and everyday culture. Situated within the dynamic field of architecture, design, and the visual arts, it reflects upon the fundamental ideas of Western culture in the twentieth century, especially the concept of Modernism.
Again and again, he refers back to the artistic avant-garde, to heroes such as Marcel Duchamp or Piet Mondrian, and establishes connections with their gestures and pictorial inventions by means of deliberate displacements of apparently ordinary objects from the contemporary world. In a permanent exchange between high and low, Mercier enigmatically poses the question as to the status of objects oscillating between functionality and artistic freedom from practical utilization when, for example, he takes pipes intended for construction purposes and converts them into benches, or transforms sporting equipment into monstrous light fixtures.
The solo exhibition of the artist Mathieu Mercier, who was born in 1970 and lives in Paris, is being developed in collaboration with the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen. It will be viewed in Esslingen as the second station immediately after its presentation at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen.