Michael Raedecker

Fifteen years after its major exhibition showcasing the art of Michael Raedecker (b. 1963, Amsterdam), Kunstmuseum Den Haag is to host a retrospective of his work. The show is part of a series of exhibitions profiling leading contemporary artists, including Norbert Schwontkowski (2020/2021) and Nicole Eisenman (2022/2023). Michael Raedecker: material worlds has been curated in close collaboration with the artist, and shows his artistic development over the past three decades.

With his unique process, combining painting and embroidery, Raedecker reflects on the world and our place within it. His work captures a melancholy atmosphere, as if he were recording memories that reside in spaces and objects. Landscapes, treehouses and suburban homes float in a realm somewhere between realism and surrealism, in which the boundaries of literal representation and abstraction are blurred.

Raedecker’s work is inspired by the collective memory, art history and popular culture. He uses many sources, including photography, obscure magazines, film stills and the internet. Before a work is created, he creates ‘demos’ of his ideas in paint and thread, which he photographs and digitally manipulates. He then transfers the resulting image to a large canvas on which, again, he builds up a sculpted surface using paint and thread. This creates a certain tension, as the original becomes a copy, which is then incorporated into the final ‘original’, the artwork that is exhibited. “Looking back, the revolutionary developments of the last thirty years have naturally seeped into my work”, says Raedecker. “I have doubted not only life, but also myself, society and painting. Perhaps not so much in terms of ‘what’ to paint, but ‘how’.”

Michael Raedecker: material worlds will feature around fifty artworks that the artist has made since 1991, from the collection of Kunstmuseum Den Haag and from institutions and private collectors in the Netherlands and Britain. One new work – inert pursuit – will also be presented. “All the paintings in this exhibition are about our presence and our visual absence in relation to our surroundings, both indoors and outdoors”, Raedecker explains. “The landscape, the suburban environment where nature meets homes built by humans. The paintings show where we live, the outside of the interior and also the variety of things we collect to make the environment we live in personal and domestic. I observe, translate and prompt people to think about ‘where’ we exist.”

The work of Michael Raedecker is internationally renowned and has been shown at a range of institutions in different countries. Raedecker studied fashion at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, and then continued his studies at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and Goldsmith’s College in London, where he has lived and worked since graduating. He has been awarded the Dutch Royal Prize for Painting (1993), the Prix de Rome basic prize (1994) and the prestigious John Moore Painting Prize (1999) in Britain. He was also shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999.