Marcel OdenbachEs brennt

Nothing is as it seems! The news had only just spread that Marcel Odenbach (*1953) received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize 2021. The small and memorable catalogue published to accompany the current exhibition at the Kunsthalle Nürnberg comes just at the right moment to illustrate the reasons for the award: for many years the Cologne artist has shown himself less interested in his own effect than in the world around him and those who share it, using his drawings, collages, videos and installations to explore questions of identity in the context of gender, class and sex. Odenbach creates works that, through their experimental form and their theoretical background, address the historical contexts of colonialism and globalisation just as much as the power of the normative and of representation. Since the mid-1970s Marcel Odenbach has developed his visual language in montages and dissolves of film and television recordings, of archival material and of images or film sequences he has produced himself. Alongside the video works he has always drawn, producing designs for video installations that also function, however, as autonomous image-text compositions. The search for traces in the archives quickly led to extensive collections of material, which Marcel Odenbach then also drew on for large-format works on paper in a special collage and copying technique. The physical tearing of pages from magazines, the superimposition and layering of visual and filmic material from different sources and temporal levels constantly generate new connections between subjective memory and the collective visual memory.

Exhibition:
Kunsthalle Nürnberg, 3/10/2020 – 14/2/2021