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Pawel Althamer Collector's Edition

By (artist) Pawel Althamer, By (author) Charles Esche, By (author) Roman Kurzmeyer

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Perhaps the most notable development in the art of the past decade has been 'relational aesthetics' -- social, collaborative, participatory art that is concerned less with producing objects than with composing human interactions. Although most critical attention has focused on its development in Western Europe and the United States, relational art has flourished in regions with less developed art economies --decommodified contemporary art scenes being a natural habitat for dematerialized artworks. Although Pawel Althamer (b. 1967) was originally trained as a sculptor, his work bears many of the marks of relational art. Often dematerialized to the point of invisibility, this work also increasingly enlists human participants in what the artist describes as 'reality directed'. For Motion Pictures (2000) Althamer choreographed actors to perform everyday actions in a public square (greeting a friend, feeding pigeons) at the same time every day for three weeks. Viewers who did not know what to look for or who did not return a second time could not know whether they had seen the artwork at all. Another major element of Althamer's work is institutional critique. For a 2003 exhibition at his Berlin gallery, Neugerrieumschneider, he transformed the high-design space into a litter-strewn shell -- essentially returning the gallery to its dilapidated pre-gentrification state. Invited to show at Paris's Centre Pompidou this autumn, he has rounded up fifteen local artists who have never exhibited in a major public space in their home city to create an ongoing project in the museum for the duration of his show. Althamer belongs to a vanguard that is freeing art from a single dominant culture (both art historical and pop cultural), creating works that are as much at home in a square in Ljubljana as they are on a sidewalk in Pittsburgh. His work has been included in Documenta X (1997) and numerous international biennials, including Berlin (2006), Istanbul (2005) and Venice (2003). In 2004 he won the prestigious Vincent van Gogh Award for Contemporary Art in Europe.