Artwork details - EVN Sammlung

Untitled
Marcus Geiger

suit, shirt, shoes and shoe bag made of terry cloth
suit: 84 × 60 cm (jacket, shirt), 110 × 60 cm (trousers); shoes: each 30 × 12 × 10 cm; shoe bag: 27 × 47 cm
2003

Acquisition 2004
Inv. No. 0133

“If a pair of trousers hangs on the wall then it’s a picture” says the Swiss artist Marcus Geiger, who has lived in Vienna since 1978. He has enduringly inscribed himself into the city’s memory by colouring the Vienna Secession “Rouge Vulgaire”, though durability is the opposite of what interests someone so notorious for understatement. For many years, Geiger has worked with “cheap” materials: packing cardboard, felt, terry towelling. As with the case in point, his work always deals with themes such as ready-mades, imitation and the ordinary along with a dose of scepticism as far as art as a consumer commodity is concerned. The work Untitled from 2003, suit, shirt and shoes go through metamorphoses depending on use and context. Worn on the body, the clothing falls into the genre of performance and “living sculpture”; on the clothes hanger, Geiger recycles Joseph Beuys, and on the wall they function as a picture, as a terry towel picture, as an investigation of materiality and colour.

Brigitte Huck, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)