l’archive d’Amuse

Kunsthalle Düsseldorf
11 March – 4 June 2023
curated by Gregor Jansen

The exhibition l'archive d'Amuse in the foyer of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is part of Matthias Wollgast's current project Collection Jacques Clio-Lascar – Estate of a Patron, which engages with the development of a culturally and socially critical staging of history in the form of an extensive collector's monograph. The protagonist of this narrative is the fictional collector Jacques Clio-Lascar, an entrepreneur who made a name for himself in his younger years through clever marketing and the establishment of his own cosmetics brand.

At the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Wollgast stages an archive room of the Clio-Lascar Collection, which also serves as a backdrop for photographs featuring the actor Stefan Lampadius as Jacques Clio-Lascar. The archive room houses a custom-built archive shelving unit stocked with a series of labeled boxes, crates, and individual sculptures. Large-format canvases on the walls create, through reduced means, the impression of archive cabinets, and a seating area invites visitors to linger within the archive.

Matthias Wollgast's work is consistently marked by a deliberate reinterpretation, obscuring, and questioning of authorship. Reality and narrative blend into one another in such a way that one can never be entirely certain which elements of his work belong to which of these spheres. Who is the author of the artworks we see: is it truly the artist presented to us? And who is really collecting here, and what exactly? In the end, everything points back to Matthias Wollgast, who, through the ever-renewed recontextualization of the works (from the supposed original, to the archive, to reproduction and documentation in film, photography, book, and website), dissolves their origin and thereby turns the process itself into the work. The distinction between categories such as work and archive, event and document, even author and recipient, is deliberately rendered impossible.

Alongside the staging of interiors, events, and exhibitions, as well as their documentation in film and photography, the project Collection Jacques Clio-Lascar also plans the development of a series of works created in the names of various fictional artists. A selection of these works will be shown in the staged archive room at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and will also be presented in a small publication and on the website created specifically for the project — a total-work-of-art principle that Matthias Wollgast has already tested successfully in previous projects.