In co-operation with The Approach, Hauser & Wirth are pleased to exhibit new work by Michael Raedecker. Raedecker practices an unusual kind of alchemy. He combines thread and paint to form shadowy netherworlds, steeped in atmosphere. Painted in glacial tones, his images have the leached-out quality of remembered dreams; their embroidered descriptions niggling the surfaces of the canvases like details that are stuck in one’s memory.
Raedecker’s works are never innocent. They steal from such disparate sources as Dutch still life painting, photographs of modernist architecture, B-movie scenes and antiquated gardening catalogues to create a pictorial language that is both deeply original and disturbingly familiar.
At Hauser & Wirth London Raedecker’s works hover unsettlingly between realism and surrealism, literalism and abstraction. These works recognise the complexities of our visual culture. They tap into a collective Western consciousness, revealing and reconstructing scenes that are somehow already known.
