Untitled
Four black-and-white digital prints on paper are taped to the wall: they are photographs of sculptures of wrestlers in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Magdeburg, Germany. Through this gesture, Leon Kahane highlights the recurrence of the wrestler motif among the museum’s works. Socialist realism’s central focus was to meet the “people,” taking social relations into account. In post-war East Germany, the wrestler embodied the class struggle that communism wanted to put an end to. Attentive to historical events, Kahane questions the legacy of this figure in art. In this process of inheritance, he has given life to the prototype of wrestlers created by his parents in the form of a porcelain sculpture entitled Plastik which he has exhibited alongside these four photographs.
Text written by Rosanne Moulin as part of the partnership between the École du Louvre and Lafayette Anticipations – Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin.
Exhibition
Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e. V, Berlin (Allemagne)
from 09 Oct 2016 to 29 Jan 2017