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Manuel Graf

Parallelstraße

Wie leben wir als Menschen und was verführt uns?

Manuel Graf (b. Bühl, 1978; lives and works in Düsseldorf) has staked out a wide-ranging terrain from which he draws the material for his works. He animates his ceramics and uses ceramics to realize his animations. His paintings, exhibition concepts, and collaborations entangle us in questions of authorship; girls wearing the high heels he makes read texts about economics to us. An architecture film disintegrates into a music video.

The juxtaposition of divergent and even incompatible models and explanations, a contrast that reveals something about their origins, plays a major role in Graf’s works. He stages this parallelism for our eyes in sprawling installations and computer-animated film projects. Just as his films roam the histories of art, architecture, and pop, his ceramics are an amalgamate of different periods and styles. In comparison with the thematic complexity of the films, these ceramics touch on a sense for the archaic and craftsmanship with a pinch of humor. A speculative take on history is implicit both in Graf’s animations and in his objects, as is the concern with a possible better future.

With photographs, writings, and interviews by Jens Asthoff, Mme Dogdo, Georg Elben, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hans-Jürgen Hafner, Annette Hans, Victor Hugo, Christopher Muller, Sabine Schaschl, Rudolf Steiner, Oliver Tepel, Susanne Titz.