Marcel Odenbach: Es brennt

It burns

It has only just been reported that Marcel Odenbach (*1953) will be awarded the 2021 Wolfgang Hahn Prize. The small and memorable catalog published on the occasion of the current exhibition at Kunsthalle Nuremberg arrives just at the right time to illustrate the reason behind the choice of this award-winner: for quite a number of years now, the Cologne-based artist has been less interested in his own impact, but rather in his surroundings and his contemporaries. With his drawings, collages, videos and installations, he ­explores questions of identity in the context of ­sexual orientation, class and gender. Odenbach forms works that, owing to their experimental form and theoretical background, focus just as much on historical connections between colonialism and globalization as on the power of the normative and of representation. Since the mid-1970s, Marcel Odenbach has developed his pictorial language in montages and cross-fades of film and television recordings, archive material as well as his own images and film sequences. Alongside the video works, he has always prepared drawings in the planning of video installations, which, however, also work as independent image-text composi­tions. Researching the archives soon led to extensive material collections that Marcel Odenbach then used for large-format paper works employing special collage and copying techniques. The ­physical tearing-out-of-magazines, the blending and layering of image and film material from dif­ferent sources and temporal levels thus generate ever-new connections between subjective ­memory and the collective visual memory.

Exhibition:
Kunsthalle Nürnberg, 3/10/2020 10/1/2021