To be a finalist for the Turner Prize in England is an honor that few younger artists ever experience. The annual prize is awarded to the best artist working in Britain. Past winners have included Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst – important fixtures on the international contemporary art scene and staples of major international exhibitions and within international collections. The usual number of shortlisted artists each year is between four and six. The Knoxville Museum
of Art is pleased and honored to be offering Michael Raedecker, a 2000 Turner Prize finalist, his first solo museum exhibition in the United States as part of the museum’s critically acclaimed SubUrban series.
Michael Raedecker was born in Amsterdam, Holland in 1963, and he attended the Gerrit Rietveld
Academie, the Ritjksakademie van Beeldene Kunsten, and then studied at Goldsmiths College. He currently makes his home in London, England. His exhibition history is a very rich one, including a current place in the Sydney Biennial in Australia.
Raedecker is known for his large-scale paintings such as breakaway from 2002/3. Measuring over 6 x 10 feet in size, the painting typifies Raedecker’s approach to the problem of painting: the landscapes tend to be familiar, yet abandoned, delicate and bleak simultaneously with a denial of the horizon line. As one reviewer noted,
“They show marginal places, dry and arid planes or valleys, barren woods, lone buildings
smothered in thick blankets of snow, or half-glimpsed through the gloomy twilight. Raedecker carefully avoids any kind of explicit narrative in his paintings; he creates evocative images that have a dreamlike, cinematic quality, like dramatic stage sets waiting for the actors.”
The surface of the composition while appearing sparse is actually heavily worked with texture
and color. Critic Jan Dubbaut also remarked, “Raedecker’s paintings play a game of taking out and leaving in. On the one hand they are empty, almost schematic images created from just a few lines, a few visual fragments. On the other hand they have something archetypical,
almost familiar about them.” The inclusion of fabric, a trademark for Raedecker, adds to the tactile quality of the painting while drawing attention to the handiwork of creation.
Much talk in the criticism of contemporary art has centered on the issue of the rise and fall of painting as a medium. Critic after critic has sounded the death of painting, arguing that the life of painting as an art form had come to an end. Others have pointed to the philosophical nature of such art as Raedecker’s as proof that painting is still alive and flourishing. In either case, the debate has brought to our attention the question of painting in the 21st century and how does one define a traditional art form in a rapidly changing visual art landscape.
