Museu d'Art Contemporani Barcelona
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… For The Osmotic Compensation
Of The Pressure Of Wealth,
Alice Creischer:
works and collaborations
February 1-May 18, 2008

The intensely narrative work of Alice Creischer (Berlin, 1960) is shaped around a quest to find instruments to visualise the forms, moments and situations in which the history of capitalism and its operating principles become tales of exploitation, exclusion and distortion of the basic principles of western democracy. Having researched the phenomena by which financial corporations are established and operate in different parts of the world, Creischer uses installations, drawings, collages, articles and texts to explore the relationships between official policy (as represented by governments’ actions), business (the huge finance and banking corporations) and culture, in which figures and new types of alienation and manipulative perversion have their origin. Her ethical position leads her to take a critical stance towards the crisis of contemporary liberal governments and fatalistic attitudes towards financial, political and social crises.

Among other initiatives that Alice Creischer has worked on is the project exArgentina, produced in collaboration with Andreas Siekmann and presented in 2004. The project is a visual and narrative account demonstrating that the economic and social crisis that hit Argentina in the 1990s was caused by the operations of international lobbies with vested interests in the region.

The exhibition at MACBA will be structured around two of Alice Creischer’s most important recent works: L’atelier de la peintrice. Allégorie réelle déterminant una phase de sept années de ma vie artistique (The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory Defining Seven Years of My Artistic Life), produced in 2000. This work (which forms part of the MACBA Collection) is a reinterpretation of a painting by Gustave Courbet in which the artist portrays himself as the central figure amid leading representatives of French culture and politics in 1855; in her reworking, Creischer depicts leading figures in the Republic of Berlin in the 1990s.

Secondly, her installation Apparat zum osmotischen Druckausgleich von Reichtum bei der Betrachtung von Armut (Apparatus for Osmotic Compensation of the Pressure of Wealth During the Contemplation of Poverty), 2005, features sculptural elements that reconstruct the artist’s experience in a journey to India in 2004 where she witenssed severe poverty. The contrast of the feelings this arouses and a sense of belonging to a world of wealth in inverse proportion is devastating. A selection of videos made by Alice Creischer with other artists complete this exhibition at MACBA, as well as many drawings and collages related to these productions.

The exhibition was curated by Bartomeu Marí.