Marcel Odenbach: Es brennt

Nothing is as it seems!

The news has just spread that Marcel Odenbach (*1953) has been awarded the 2021 Wolfgang Hahn Prize. The small and memorable catalogue published to accompany the current exhibition at the Kunsthalle Nuremberg comes just in time to illustrate the reasons for the award: For many years, the Cologne-based artist has been less interested in his own impact than in his surroundings and the world around him, using his drawings, collages, videos and installations to address questions of identity in the context of gender, class and sex. Odenbach creates works that, through their experimental form and theoretical background, address historical contexts of colonialism and globalisation as well as the power of the normative and representation. Since the mid-1970s, Marcel Odenbach has developed his visual language in montages and superimpositions of film and television recordings, archive material and self-produced images or film sequences. Parallel to his video works, he always drew, creating designs for video installations that also function as autonomous image-text compositions. The search for traces in the archives quickly led to extensive collections of material, which Marcel Odenbach then also used for large-format works on paper using a special collage and copying technique. The physical tearing out of magazines, the superimposition and layering of image and film material from different sources and time levels constantly create new connections between subjective memory and the collective visual memory.

Exhibition:
Kunsthalle Nuremberg, 3/10/2020 - 14/2/2021