how to be invisible

Galerie Rupert Pfab, Düsseldorf
2 September – 29 October 2022

For his project "Collection Jacques Clio-Lascar," Matthias Wollgast developed a staged archive of artworks and documents. For the first time, the conceptually working artist presented parts of the "Collection" in his solo exhibition at Galerie Rupert Pfab. The exhibition title how to be invisible was programmatic in this respect. Thematically, the new works circled around processes of dissolution, transformation, and destruction, but also of hiding, packaging, and preserving. They drew on both the invented and the found — motifs from art history as well as from everyday culture, textiles, postcards, paper bags, literature, and photography — bringing them, after processing, into deliberate juxtaposition as collage, camera-less photography, sculpture, or painting. The presentation took place on a specially created backdrop of archive shelving and wall displays. These provided the stage for the performance of a thematic group exhibition in the form of a one-person play. The works on view appeared here as actors in a staging of ordered heterogeneity, communicating with one another, relating to and rejecting each other. In this interplay of things, the presence or absence of the body, of the author, and of the artist ultimately also became an important concern.

"How to be invisible"? The question touched not only the artist Matthias Wollgast himself, or contemporary artists in general. Those embedded in a digital infrastructure found themselves faced with the need to strike a balance between the urge to communicate and the compulsion to do so. The simultaneous longing for invisibility and for attention spread like a cold sweat across user interfaces, acting as a present-day double bind reaching deep into even the most private spheres.