This is Gerhard Richter’s sixth institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland in just over a decade, yet Kunsthaus Zurich’s survey of his landscapes, if not a thrilling choice, is worth visiting. The group of works themselves, fighting against a hollow curation, reassert Richter as a major force in pop art and a poet of the opaqueness of narrative image. The exhibition begins around the time he (along with classmates Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg and Sigmar Polke) rented a butcher’s shop from the city of Duesseldorf for their «German pop art» exhibition. No mention of that term or defining event is anywhere, as the mediation leans heavily on Richter’s contrivance of «mechanically reproduced» «second-hand landscapes» and its «reflection on the lost potential of painting», as if he is solely a master of art about art. Egyptian Landscape, 1964/1965, a grid of desert tourist sites with painted captions predates Baldessari by a hair and makes clear the critical intention in using the photographic.

Zu dumm nur, wenn man sich vorgenommen hat, eine Kritik über das Forsythe-Projekt im Kunsthaus Zürich zu schreiben und dann hingeht und merkt, dass es nichts zu kritisieren gibt.

Sense is fashioned and not innate, meaning is wrenched from randomness, just as sanity is also a constructed state that must be carefully maintained but is always vulnerable to the indifferent flux. We have likely all been working hard on maintaining a grip on sanity this past year, in the face of a seismic breakdown in the parameters of daily life. All shows right now are infused with pandemic weirdness. There is a sense of transgression in even standing in an art space after being bludgeoned for months with the behest to ‘stay at home’. Everyone is emerging slowly from their hideouts, twitching awkwardly. But there is a need to start to process our collective experience of the great viral vagueness. To get a handle on the dimensions of the suffering that has occurred, while grappling with dismay at the politicians fumbling in the shadow of the reaper, an ugly vaccine nationalism and unimagined new manifestations of social alienation. Our collective sanity is clearly ailing as the novelty of the new normal wears thin and the pandemic grinds on.

«Over the bed, under the skin, inside the head» lautet der Titel von Dominic Michels Ausstellung im Ausstellungsraum Hamlet. Er suggeriert etwas Musikalisches, ein Kreuzreim in angenehmem Takt, nicht zu langatmig, eingängig. Vielleicht auch unfertig. Es könnte ein Refrain aus einem Popsong sein, eine Kollaboration der Rolling Stones, T.A.T.U. und den Talking Heads. Tauscht man die Subjekte, ergibt sich eine leichte Bedeutungsverschiebung, dennoch ist klar, was in der Aufmerksamkeit steht: der Körper und das Bett, in welchem er sich ausruht.