Art Metropole

29 Sep. 2004

Book launch for Matthias Herrmann's 8 x 10"

Artist

Matthias Herrmann

Writers

Andrea Fitzpatrick and Bill Arning

Time

5 pm - 7 pm

Art Metropole is pleased to announce a reception to celebrate the release of a new book by Matthias Herrmann, titled 8 × 10”. The artist will be present at the reception, which will take place at Art Metropole on Saturday, September 29th, 2004 from 5 to 7 PM.

Viennese artist Matthias Herrmann is well known for his photographic self-portraits that walk the line between erotic fantasy and aesthetic transgression. Using found text to illustrate images of his own body, Herrmann’s work engages questions of intimacy, exposure, melancholy, sexual pleasure and emotional alienation.

“Irony, identity and abstraction are essential aspects of my works” says the artist, “I’m particularly interested in the moments when we are able to let ourselves free, for a short moment, from the role we are expected to enact and find ourselves in a comical and absurd situation when we wouldn’t like anyone to see us. A sort of…improper-ness.”

8× 10” presents 128 hyper-aestheticized and homoerotically charged images of Herrmann that reveal the artist’s unusual sense of humour and his ironic distance from what might appear to be private sexual explorations. Essays by Bill Arning and Andrea Fitzpatrick discuss personal and theoretical responses to his work.

Matthias Herrmann, born 1963 in Munich, lives and works in Vienna. In addition to 8 × 10” Art Metropole will be presenting his recent Hotel series including Hotel, Hotel 2001 and Hotel Diary.

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