16.08.–14.09.2003
"Unlike much conceptual art, that of Ader is not the recording of a normal occurrence from reality but constructed work. This is where poetry creeps in."
Paul Andriesse, Bas Jan Ader: Kustenaar/Artist, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1988, p. 74
In terms of their sober narration, Bas Jan Ader's 16mm films, videos and photographs are certainly very much attached to the conceptual art of his contemporaries. But time and again it is the artist himself who becomes the actor in an objective narration. What characterises Ader's work is not the performance, with its focus on the body, acting and authentically carrying out an artistic idea, but rather film or serial photography possessing an artificial narrative structure. The staging of tragedy, quiet comedy or self-irony, as well as the examination of the metaphorical notion of "falling", for instance, or the romantic topoi of "searching" and of "farewell" inform Ader's work with a powerful yet inwardly directed sense of poetry.
Bas Jan Ader was born in 1942 in Winschoten, Holland, and from 1963 until his early death in 1975, he lived and worked predominantly in California. The exhibition presents a selection of work created between 1970 and 1974, the period shortly before the artist disappeared without a trace, when, as the second part of a planned trilogy called "In Search of the Miraculous", he attempted to cross the Atlantic alone in a small sailing-boat. The tragic failure of this journey influenced the general reception of his work over a long period of time. His work in its entirety, however, has always been highly relevant for other artists and up until today has its repercussions on a very young generation of artists. Ader's entire oeuvre has been recalled again by an academic interest in recent years and by a number of exhibitions in Germany and other European countries. With this exhibition, which was previously shown in a similar form in the Rooseum in Malmö and at Index in Stockholm, we are happy to now present to the Frankfurt audience as well a specific selection of Ader's works.
The exhibition is a collaboration with the Rooseum, Malmö and Index, Stockholm.