This first overview of Altmann's work to date, characterized by a strongly socio-critical consciousness, reveals the artist's influences and inspirations.
Published in conjunction with an institutional survey at the Kunst Museum Winterthur, this is the artist's first monograph. Mathis Altmann's artistic strategy is formally based on the principle of the collage, which has a long tradition in art history, as does its three-dimensional form, the assemblage. In contrast with the reductionist tendencies of the modern period, the assemblage served to adamantly establish connections with the world by directly juxtaposing diverse items from everyday life: collages or assemblages are material reflections of the world, metaphors for the world. This tradition is expanded by Altmann using ephemeral media such as light and sound to firmly link them to the present. The French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use the term assemblage to describe unformed materials and fluidity that give access to new spaces by deciphering known territories or giving them new codes. Altmann does no less when he addresses the promises and codes of social media and consumer and commodity culture, translating them into his own world as Amalgamate, complex miniature worlds and room-sized installations.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Kunst Museum Winterthur in 2021-2022.
Mathis Altmann (born 1987 in Munich, lives and works in Los Angeles and Zurich) belongs to a generation of artists whose work is characterized by a strongly socio-critical consciousness. His well thought-out installations torpedo the illusion of a glamorous and carefree world by allowing viewers to look behind the facades of the beautiful appearance. Altmann creates scenarios full of contrasts out of consumer goods, everyday objects, waste and building materials. It is a refined play with the traditions of assemblage and collage, which in terms of content is accompanied by the depiction of a disparate world. The works are based on themes such as abundance, consumption, disposable society, functionality and superficiality. The conditions of creative digital work in the environment of an accelerated and globalized urban everyday life are especially important to him. He does not counter the complexity of the world with simplification, but by exaggerating the abundance of information into the grotesque. In the exemplary nature of the works, however, there is also a need for idealization, which Altmann reduces to absurdity through fierce irony and targeted hybridization. In his work he strives for a theatrical staging with a false bottom. Altmann thus creates a complex nesting of fragments of content and form that play with ambiguities, controversies and incompatibilities. In this way he encounters the randomness of life as well as the astonishing reflex of man to recognize patterns and order everywhere and to derive meaningful information and stories from them.
Mathis Altmann was awarded the 12th Manor Art Prize of the Canton of Zurich.
