In the retrospective exhibition “Erobert die Wohnzimmer dieser Welt!” (Conquer the living rooms of this world!), the Kunstmuseum Thurgau is presenting the artistic strategies of the conceptual artist H.R. Fricker, who lives in Trogen, in a comprehensive manner for the first time. Selected key works by the artist are used to demonstrate the complexity of his approach. Fluctuating between documentation and installation, the exhibition unfolds one of the most exciting works of Swiss art.
H.R. Fricker, born in Zurich in 1947, is one of the most distinguished artists of his generation. Influenced by the 1968 movement and the dawn of art in the 1970s, he developed an extraordinary oeuvre in which communicative and aesthetic strategies are combined in an innovative way. H.R. Fricker understands his artistic activity equally as an aesthetic, social and communicative act. He uses the free space of art to postulate social concerns and simultaneously infiltrates society with his artistic activities. In doing so, he deliberately seeks spaces for his activity outside the gallery and museum business, often entering forbidden territory. At the same time, he founds his own museums and in this way uses a traditional cultural form of expression for his own artistic research; occupying spaces and shifting contexts is thus an important strategy of his art. He works in places as diverse as public space, the envelope, the living room, but also on the Internet. Here and elsewhere he changes the situation with his messages and creates new contexts that are capable of irritating perception again and again.
In the context of this exhibition, the entire oeuvre of H.R. Fricker has been reviewed and the extensive archive has been restructured. In an online publication, 142 groups of works are now available in eight chapters with introductions by Ute Christiane Hoefert, with representative illustrations, descriptions and detailed captions. Text contributions by Markus Landert, Kornelia Röder and Ursula Badrutt illuminate the artist’s work from various perspectives, and a conversation between Matthias Kuhn and H.R. Fricker impressively conveys the artist’s motivation and thinking.
The website erobertdiewohnzimmer.net provides access to individual works, allows texts to be searched or the entire oeuvre to be filtered for specific terms. From the texts, groups of works can be accessed via illustration numbers and vice versa. The contents, arranged as a horizontal band, also entice the viewer to take long walks along the extended image track. The texts and the individual groups of works can be saved and printed out as PDF files. The entire content of the online publication is available in a print-on-demand edition in either English or German.