Michael Kunze's »Les Messieurs d'Avignon« are well-known great minds from the areas of art and philosophy at the end of 19th to the end of the 20th centuries. They are the »bad boys of modernity«, whom Kunze presents in over 60 pictures - from Friedrich Nietzsche to Michel Houellebecq. Common to them all is that they stand, each in his different way, strikingly aloof: although they cannot be imagined outside their time and place, they dodge or undermine the accepted idea of a strictly operating model of progress. This contradiction is the common theme of the presented collection.

Kunze's cycle refers to a primal image of modernity that has today become conceptually problematic: Pablo Picasso's picture »Demoiselles d'Avignon« from 1907. One thing strikes the viewer at once in this prominent starting-point of a now official avant garde, with its private party of cubistically analysed women's bodies: the absence of men. They are restored in Kunze's portraits and pictures, which refer with this historical allusion to a treasury of images and ideas that gains meaning in a model of modernity beyond Karl Marx and Coca-Cola.

Credits

• Gregor Jansen (Curator)

Organization / Institution

ZKM