Horst MünchUnser Krieg

It is a nervous laugh that can come over one on opening the newspaper and allowing the great geopolitical debates to take effect. Which sample, which crisis shall it be? Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Somalia … Again and again, and more and more, we fear that the sky will fall on our heads. And so the world of the new peace orders lurches merrily from one list to the next; always right in the midst of it, casting a „sidelong glance“, is Horst Münch. Even the small canvases, but of course still more the large ones, block our view of every problem on and with the map. Where they might explain something, but … should they be doing that at all? Isn’t Berlin here? No, that must be China! I can quite clearly make out Russia, but why does Europe begin up there? The conversations in front of the pictures all resemble one another. Everything begins there and ends over there, wherever it happens to be connected. The way the USA has drawn its own borders looks as much like a drawing-board exercise as the drawing of the borders of Iraq; is that the much-invoked closeness? This is how the world has always been represented within art history, whether on the maps of the Mercator brothers or in one or another painting of abstract art. Here too there are struggles between coastlines that could be animals and areas that are dull or garish like nothingness or the collapse of the echo sounder. And Horst Münch? Is he responsible for this? If he could explain anything to us, then surely in his text! And there he says: „Nature is prodigal without measure, indifferent without measure, without intentions and considerations, without mercy and justice, fertile and barren and uncertain all at once; it is indifference as power.“

Exhibition:
Künstlerhaus Palais Thurn und Taxis Bregenz, 24/11 – 30/12/2007