Hales Gallery is pleased to announce Martin Wilner's participation in Toys Redux — On Play and Critique at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Contemporary Art) in Zurich.
This exhibition, curated by Raphael Gygax and Judith Welter, brings together artists who use formats and imagery from popular culture that are usually addressed to children or teenagers. Such adoption of motifs disseminated in specific entertainment formats should not be seen merely as a reference to or appropriation of popular culture. It becomes an implicit or explicit critique of a kind of capitalist production of consumer worlds that targets specific audiences but has also infiltrated the field of art for quite some time. Such playful children’s or fantasy worlds, with their pop aesthetic and inherent promise of “innocence,” contrast with the reality of these neoliberal advertising and market strategies. Subjected to a contextual shift, the rhetoric of these formats develops a new vocabulary.
Michael Smith
Toys Redux — On Play and Critique
30 May - 16 August 2015
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst
Limmatstrasse 270
CH–8005 Zurich
Switzerland
