'Puberty in Teaching', Michael Krebber
The title of the exhibition, 'Puberty in Teaching', is at first slight paradoxical, since the two concepts, teaching and puberty, seem contradictory.
One thinks both of Michael Krebber's idea of Puberty in Painting and also of his professorship at the Städel School in Frankfurt. Also implied is
the question, of whether it is possible to teach art at all and, if it is the case that there is no subject matter to teach, of how authority is then to be defined.
Here Krebber is presenting a subject that is for him deeply serious, one which he has pursued passionately, and in which he is committed to an attitude
which is in itself contradictory, indeed quasi pubertarian.
Michael Krebber (born 1954) is one of the most influential artists working in Cologne, and we delighted to be presenting his first exhibition in a major
institution here in Cologne. Krebber plays an important role precisely for the younger generation of international artists, people like Merlin Carpenter,
Sergej Jensen, Michael Beutler and John Kelsey. He became known in the Eighties and Nineties as the antithesis of the positions represented in Berlin
and Cologne by painters like Baselitz, Lüperz, Kippenberger and Oehlen.
Michael Krebber was always viewed as a painter with a conceptual orientation. This label is applied to an oeuvre in which he has for more than 25 years
been testing out the frontiers and possibilities of painting, without his work itself always appearing in the form of painting. However attributing him to
conceptualism diverts attention from the purely formal qualities of his work. The question arises of whether Krebber uses this type of attribution simply
as a trick for his work at certain times, in which grasping or outreach and simultaneous rejection, false bottoms, dead ends and illusions everywhere immanent.
But the more recent term Formalism too, once considered by all and sundry to be a form of smoothly functioning double-agency, should be included in any
debate on widening the approach to reception and production.
Exclusively sculptures on show in the exhibition puberty in sculpture; pieces of sawn-up surfboards as wall sculptures, and on the lawn in front of the
Kunstverein an open air sculpture inspired by the HOLLYWOOD sign, displaying the words Herr Krebber in large letters. All these ideas either from
bad jokes, or just plain uninteresting, or stolen or copied from somewhere else. Surfboards, carved in slices like tuna-fish and hung on the wall like a
Donald Judd sculpture, and the words Herr Krebber erected like a sign to attract buyers for a plot of land. These sculptures confront us with the weight
and materiality which required by object-based practice, requirements which can be avoided in teaching, philosophy and in other forms of mediation.
Herr Krebber is an adaptation of Paul Valéry's Monsieur Teste, who is incapable of identifying with any one role, whatever it might be, and who “is aw of
the possibility that forgery too can be forged”. In this exhibition and in the book which accompanies it, the answer to the question of how Monsieur Teste
would deal with these sculptures is put on hold.' (Michael Krebber)
As back-up for the exhibition, which, with its concentration on sculpture, introduces a second phase in Krebber's work, Stefan Hoderlein will show films in
the Kunstverein, which he has shot with by night a thermal-imaging camera in car parks favoured for cruising. The catalogue too forms a central part of
the exhibition, with texts by Alex Foges, John Kelsey and Tanja Widmann, and a series of more than eighty reproductions of Michael Krebber's older drawings.
It is deisgned by Manuel Raeder with Michael Krebber, published by the Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König and available via www.koelnischerkunstverein.de