Einzelausstellung Hansi Fuchs. SUGAR CRASH

Daten

Beschreibung

“A hero needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle.” If you put him in a box, “he looks like a rabbit, like a potato,” writes Ursula K. Le Guin in her essay about telling the story of “the thing to put things in, the container for things contained.” The box does not merely delineate negative space, it is not just a container for something else, but it actively transforms whatever is put inside it.

Hansi Fuchs’s boxes inside boxes, boxes on top of boxes, boxes next to boxes create stacked layerings of overlapping enclosures, nested concealments multiplied through semi-transparent veiling and opaque coating, expanding from wall-based paintings to the exhibition space. Employing a maximalist explosion of heterogeneous references to a boundless archive of cute commodities, sweet treats, gimmicks, infrastructure, and the iconography of the cityscape, Fuchs plunges deep into the messiness of processes of meaning-making and signification as an endless chain of containers containing each other, a centerless Matryoshka doll.

The chocolate boxes used in SUGAR CRASH are sourced from the signature packaging of the traditional Austrian chocolate artisan Altmann & Kühne. They are typically given as gifts on festive occasions, Christmas, birthdays, moments of congratulation, to apologize, to proclaim love, to be formal (and a bit sweet at the same time). The shiny, glossy, decorating packaging of commodities is a means of fetishistic abstraction, of concealment of conditions of production, of labour, time, and bodies sedimented in them—in the case of sugar a particularly brutal legacy as one of the first major colonial goods and a key stimulant in driving the acceleration of capitalist regimes whose necessary crises disintegrate the present.

The aesthetics of minorness and cuteness that guide the design of sweets and the objects scattered across the exhibition space enables us to enjoy the fantasy of being in control over soft, malleable, diminutive, sweet commodities, sugar-coating the reality of control they exert over us. Hansi Fuchs’s sweets are made of concrete.

–Jo Pistorius

[Quelle: Einladung]

Beteiligte

Hansi Fuchs