Mandla Reuter at Kunsthalle Basel

The Kunsthalle Basel will host German artist Mandla Reuter‘s first solo show in Switzerland.

This one-man show will explore two different but very connected concepts: fiction and reality. The center of this exhibition is a plot of land owned by the artist in Los Angeles. Instead of images of this place, Mandla Reuter shows the location from different sides in different ways avoiding any direct representation. This multifaced approach opens to several different interpretations and leads to question the reality and the actual existence of the place itself.

The uncertainty of this evoked reality is anyway testified strongly by the objects displayed in the show. This deceptive effect is also conveied by a somehow unusual use of the space wich is divided into two parts, splitting again Mandla Reuter’s exhibition in two dichotomies: the exploration of Reuter’s plot of land in Los Angeles and the artificiality of the entire scene.

This conceptual and fisical separation and confrontation of extremes is central in Mandla Reuter‘s approach to the artistic representation of the real and the fictive, trying to bridge the gap between the two and at the same time demonstrating how such an attempt can fail.

At Kunsthalle Basel, Reuter takes the institution’s ground plan and strips it of its usual function. By splitting the lower galleries into two parts and separating one from the other, he allows for two different presentations to be experienced.