Artists Hendrikje Kühne and Beat Klein share a passion for collecting and for making things with their hands, activities to which they bring a subversive humor. They’re known for building miniature cities from cardboard and have also constructed a map of the world in which the size of each country is determined by its significance to the global tourist industry. In the artists’ current exhibition they continue their subtle social critique, but with a new slant. Food Design No. 1–No. 93, 2004, is a group of nearly one hundred small sculptures made from photos of food that have been cut from magazines and meticulously mounted on cardboard. Grotesque combinations emerge, as when, for instance, a gold-wrapped Ferrero Rocher chocolate lands on a sliced smoked ham. Kühne and Klein have also secretly investigated the shoppers who stock their carts with such delicacies. Using eighty-three discarded receipts from supermarkets in three countries, they have put together portraits of the consumers in the form of colorful bar codes. Mounted on paper and hung on the wall, the eighty-three codes look like a large abstraction, though in reality, of course, they’re a profile of society. The work, logically enough, is called Erzeugen Tomaten einen Hang zur Schwermut? (Do Tomatoes Cause Melancholic Tendencies?). The question is left unanswered, but the installation is provocative in an intelligent and humorous way.
Translated from German by Emily Speers Mears.
