extended until June 1!

We are delighted to be presenting the exhibition Gift – Gegengift. Krankheitsbilder einer Stadt by Franz Wanner from March 28 to May 18, 2014.
In the exhibition Gift – Gegengift. Krankheitsbilder einer Stadt Franz Wanner has created a narrative framework of factual and fictional elements. His hometown of Bad Tölz is presented as a microcosm where German realities are dissected and portrayed as examples. His ludic montage of photographic, filmic, and text-based levels describes the town, renowned as a spa because of its high-iodine-content water, as a conflictual site of historical, social, and nonmaterial processes. Research-based and associatively interrelated episodes, augmented by a biographical perspective, elaborate a lucid analysis of Germany’s present. Wanner contrasts economic and ideological value-creation strategies characteristic of Bad Tölz at image and sound levels as toxin and antitoxin. Iodine, medicinal in small doses but toxic in larger quantities, serves as a metaphor for thinking about mindsets, approaches to the past, and the disciplinary productive forces of deep socioeconomic crises.

Bad Tölz’s social rise as a glamorous spa town and its decline, which investment in Germany’s first indoor/outdoor waterpark was intended to curtail, the town’s national-socialist past, as well as Wanner’s personal experiences constitute the main strands of the narrative. Historical events become related to present developments. Its security as a location and the weapons industry’s casual integration into the town’s conservative self-image are detected as further nonmaterial “toxins” that distort mentalities and shape realities.
Episodes concerning the impact on the town of American occupying troops, a German-German spy story, and the effect of a “near-concert” by Neil Young on the local music scene broaden this sociogram of Bad Tölz shot through with aptly comic elements that can be read as a mirror of formative economic and societal processes in Germany.

Franz Wanner (*1975 in Bad Tölz) graduated 2008 at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München. Since 2000 the former Award winner of Bildende Künste der Landeshauptstadt München (2012) works under the alias Franz Wanner. With his work he was i.a. part of the following exhibitions: Gift-Gegengift. Krankheitsbilder einer Stadt, Museum für Photographie, Braunschweig (2013), Redunanz, Galerie für Landschaftskunst, Wandelhalle Bald Tölz (2012), Final Proof Open Art Munich, Galerie der Künstler, Munich (2011), 59 Seconds & Beyond, Spektre Gallery, New York (2010).
The artist works and lives in Munich. 

May 8, 2014 artist talk and film presentation

For the selection of books for the exhibition please click here.

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