Michael Riedel: Poster - Painting - Presentation

Michael Riedel: Poster—Painting—Presentation is the first of Riedel’s books to examine in depth the practice for which he has become best known: the systematic creation of paintings from posters generated with text he finds online. 

Michael Riedel produces some of today’s most captivating and complex contemporary art. With a practice that spans new media, book and magazine production, and painting, Riedel is as comfortable in the world of print and analog information as he is in the digital realm of websites and HTML code.

Using websites that mention his work in some respect—ranging from reviews to exhibition pages—Riedel copies and pastes the HTML code, highlighting certain words as he goes along, into one of his thirty-four poster templates, which he then arranges in different colors and orientations to make his paintings. The number of possible paintings, while high, is not infinite since there is a fixed set of posters. Perhaps, even more interesting than the limit, or the way Riedel uses self-referentiality in his source text, is the idea of making paintings out of words, or turning text into pigment. By using the code to make posters, Riedel creates a palette of words from which his paintings are generated. His process distances words from their traditional or literal meanings, and presents them visually, almost as symbols. The words’ meaning is not altogether lost, but the emphasis is visual as language begins to take on painterly significance.

With a new essay by Tina Kukielski, curator and Executive Director of ART21, Michael Riedel: Poster—Painting—Presentation lays out for the first time the intricate and rich process behind the artist’s ongoing series of paintings. The book, like the essay, is divided into three sections—one dedicated to Riedel’s posters, one to his Poster Paintings, and one to his more recent PowerPoint Paintings—and provides clarity around the artist’s practice without eliminating the style and inherent complexity of his work. For experts and newcomers alike, Michael Riedel: Poster—Painting—Presentation is an essential exploration of one of the most innovative contemporary artists working today.

Since the late 1990s, Michael Riedel has advanced his own model of a self-sustaining artistic production, continuously using reproductions as a means to “reintroduce the system of art into the art system.” His practice has incorporated a wide range of media and included large-scale works on canvas, fabric works, film and video, audio recordings, installations, and events. A central focus is the production and design of books, catalogues, brochures, posters, and invitation cards; these works often accompany and document his exhibitions.

Tina Kukielski is Executive Director of ART21, a nonprofit art organization specializing in digital media about contemporary art, and a curator and writer based in New York. She has previously held curatorial positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Carnegie Museum of Art, and has independently curated art projects in Milan, Dubai, Miami, and New York. She was a co-curator of the acclaimed 2013 Carnegie International. She was a contributor to the recently published anthology poised to become a key resource on digital art, Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century. In 2014, she spearheaded the digital recovery of original Andy Warhol artworks made on the Amiga computer, in partnership with Cory Arcangel, and co-produced a documentary film on the subject. In 2015, she curated the group exhibition All Watched Over at James Cohan Gallery, which included the work of Michael Riedel.