Silkscreen print on cotton handkerchief
approx. 40 x 40 cm
We are very proud to announce, that we have won the Cologne based artist Marcel Odenbach* for the Vereinsgabe 2020. He has printed the head of a lamb on an approx. 40 x 40 cm cotton handkerchief in silkscreen printing. Fascinated by the story surrounding the recently completed restoration work on the Ghent Altar by Jan and Hubert van Eyck (created between 1432 and 1435), after which it became apparent that the original representation of the lamb had been interpreted differently by the artist himself, Odenbach adopted this motif. For five centuries, church censorship led to the overpainting of the lamb, which can be seen as a form of iconoclasm – the surprising part is that the lamb has human traits and seems to interact with the viewer. Instead of the eyes of the lamb, Odenbach now added his own eyes. His choice of the motif also has to do with his own biography, after all. For example, as a Cologne native, Odenbach has been deeply influenced by a city in which relics and, above all, the pictorial sources in the Catholic Church are overrepresented with the iconographic symbolism of the altarpieces.
The idea of printing the motif on a handkerchief is eventually a reference to the Shroud of Turin, another Catholic symbol. In particular, however, it also refers to his earlier installation Alles Gute kommt von Oben from 2005, in which the portrait of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie was shown on 150 handkerchiefs lying on the floor (shown in the exhibition Äthiopien und Deutschland in the GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde, Leipzig and Goethe-Institut Addis Abeba, 2006). With this he reflected the appearance of the emperor, who liked to see himself as “Lord of the Lords” and let such cloths rain from the sky after feeding the poor.
(*Marcel Odenbach is a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf since 2010. He was recently awarded the Wolfgang-Hahn-Prize 2021 of the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst at the Museum Ludwig. His works have been shown in numerous important solo and group exhibitions since 1978. His most recent solo exhibitions include Fine Arts Museum, Ho Chi Minh City (2020), National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai (2018), Kunsthalle Wien (2017) and Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2016). Currently, Kunsthalle Nürnberg is presenting his exhibition Es brennt).
The Kölnischer Kunstverein is now in its eighth year after the introduction of the Vereinsgabe: an original artwork by internationally renowned artists, which can only be obtained through a membership. With their contributions, artists such as Rosemarie Trockel, Lawrence Weiner, Kai Althoff, Isa Genzken, Luc Tuymans, Wolfgang Tillmans, Candida Höfer and now Marcel Odenbach have — each in their own way — contributed to the recognition of the civic commitment of the members: A model that must be continued.
