The Kristian Vistrup Madsen Show

24.01.2024 - 28.01.2024

Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, Wien / Österreich

In June 2023, the conference The Practice of Criticism asked the following question: "How do art and criticism actually relate to each other?" The initiators argued for the imperative of preserving the difference between art and criticism, as well as the necessity of claiming and questioning a common framework through mutual reference. Without redefining and elaborating the discursive relations of artistic practice and criticism, the thought went, and without constantly reformulating this relationship itself as a problem, art and criticism become zero-sum games....
Studios 610 and 621, Painting department, OKP2, Angewandte, Vienna


A few months later, the art critic Kristian Vistrup Madsen published an article based on his contribution to the conference. Aptly titled "Conversations with Friends," Madsen reported on the possibility that "criticality has become its own form of kitsch." However, the text does not suggest rejecting criticism altogether, but rather to discarding historically established parameters and approaching the question in the following way: "what [art] work can stand to be stared at in person and at length. Engaged with. Written about. [...] This is where criticism begins. It’s an invitation to a conversation, and for others to disagree, which they will."

While considering the complex and complicated relationship between the critic and the criticized, The Kristian Vistrup Madsen Show (TKVMS) materializes some aspects of the themes discussed at the conference and in Madsen’s text. Accordingly, the exhibition is intended to be something other than just a selection of works corresponding to the principles of a thematic group show: it explores the ambivalence between the adaptation to a discursive framework and what Madsen calls "artistic art." In contrast to the numerous exhibitions about critics in recent years, this is an exhibition for a critic – and yet a continuation of the productive difference between art and its criticism.

Kristian Vistrup Madsen is a writer and art critic based in Berlin. He has contributed to magazines such as Artforum, Harpers, The White Review, and Kunstkritikk. Doing Time: Essays on Using People was published by Floating Opera Press in 2021. Kristian Vistrup Madsen was not involved in the conception of this exhibition.

A cooperation between the departments of Art History, Painting, and Philosophy in the context of the seminar Art Criticism by Kathrin Heinrich.

[Quelle: Einladung]