First of all, of course, there is unlimited redundancy.

And yet there cannot be a better picture of what the artist Michael Riedel has been doing in Licht since his student days.

With copies of exhibitions published with a slight delay to the “original”, let's say in the Portikus or in his own former art space on Oskar-von-Miller-Straße.

With large presentations such as "CV (Curriculum Vitae)" in the Zürcher Kunsthalle, the "Visited and Unvisited Exhibitions" at the Kunstverein Braunschweig or "Kunste zur Text" with which the Städelschule graduate, who was born in Rüsselsheim in 1972, can be seen a few years ago in the Schirn Kunsthalle was.

Christoph Schütte

Freelance author in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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For Riedel, who now teaches in Leipzig, basically everything, the art business and its manifestations, the work of art, its parameters and the echo that all of this generates in the media, for example, are material without a difference.

Shapes, images, signs that flow back into art without any problems.

Work in progress

When Riedel introduces himself with “exhibition views” in the Perpétuel gallery in Frankfurt, he initially shows nothing more and nothing less than exactly that: a good dozen exhibition views printed on glass, for example from Art Basel, the Armory Show or Art Cologne , where he again showed works based on images from exhibitions.

Collaged posters of his own shows, one or the other edition or an invitation card from the former Michael Neff gallery, where he slid the negative version of an Offenbach club precisely into the exhibition rooms 15 years ago. As a huge sculpture that reflects the chic “White Cube” in deep black. And yet Riedel's art can hardly be grasped more vividly and precisely than with the machine, which made its grand entrance on the long vernissage evening and printed the gallery's window with the title of the exhibition during the opening. And so the exhibition literally described one to one. A work in progress and in an endless loop that shows the random passer-by exactly what it promises.

And of course not.

If you look closely, what you see remains open.

Whether it is a work of art, whether the lettering merely names one thing, possibly only designating it as an abstraction of itself - or whether the work is actually exhausted in its reference to itself.

The question is difficult to decide.

If it is true that machine art always gives birth to new art and is basically sufficient in itself, then Michael Riedel is the artist of the hour.

And the “exhibition views” at Perpétuel, of all places, in exactly the right place.

■ The exhibition in the Frankfurter Galerie Perpétuel, Oppenheimer Straße 39, is open until January 8, Tuesdays to Thursdays from 2pm to 6pm and Saturdays from 12pm to 2pm.