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Artworks:

Thomas Hirschhorn

1957
From his training in graphic design, Thomas Hirschhorn has retained a taste for creating art from photographs, texts and forms assembled in a certain order. Likewise, he has kept the need to transmit through his works a message that is not conditioned by commercial imperatives or the demands of the person or institution that has commissioned the work.

His preferred materials – cardboard, silver foil, Plexiglas – are as banal and temporary as they are easy to obtain. Their jumble, with newspaper clippings and videos from television news, sketches out the cartography of a condemnation, that of overconsumption, the waste of images, the forgetting of violence. Here political and aesthetic dimensions come together and artmaking takes the form of both a commitment in the world and an involvement with reality.

Exuberant, hybrid, cacophonic, fragile, proliferating, Hirschhorn’s visual and conceptual collages, which are something between sculptures and installations, invade the physical and mental space of viewers, who are taken to task by the immediacy of the content and unsettled by the brutality of the images.

Between repulsion and fascination, Hirschhorn’s art provokes conflicting sentiments the declared aim of which is to shake viewers out of their torpor. The artist deliberately seizes on images that he knows will spark aversion; when he fills exhibition venues with these images ad nauseam, he is looking to forcefully and violently stir up an awareness in viewers.