Faking the Real

Around the explosive term Fake, the exhibition at Kunsthaus Graz traces the development of the interfaces between graphic design and art since 1971, reflecting both political upheavals and technological developments. Faking the Real explores the question of the manipulation of realities and reveals an evolution from posters in public space through to interventions in social media. The exhibition is part of the large-scale special show Art of Seduction, which examines 100 years of graphic design and poster art from different perspectives.

Especially in the last few decades, both graphic designers and artists have used the concepts and ideas of selling, manipulating and celebrating in parallel. They are more and more clearly influenced by each other –not just through appropriation, but in confident affirmation.  Apart from material innovations, it is in particular technological innovations that are driving not only commercial graphics, but also art in its mirror. Digital layout programmes create almost endless possibilities for surface designs. Coming from collage, the first image editing programmes inspired pioneering positions in art such as John Baldessari to create smooth image montages and, from the 1980s onwards, spurred the first generation of digital artists, including Peter Kogler, Thomas Bayrle and Laurie Andersen, to create ever larger graphics, expanding spatially. Very current positions in art, such as Christiane Peschek and Hito Steyerl, who has a solo exhibition in Space01 at the Kunsthaus, not only interactively merge the analogue and digital worlds, but also produce their inseparable and invisible fusion. The question of the ‘applied’ as something covertly seductive, remote, calculated and manipulated by an invisible hand, is posed here once again in an entirely new way.

With works by John Baldessari, Guerrilla Girls, Hans Haacke, Gazi Herzog, Peter Kogler, Barbara Kruger, Sonia Leimer, Sarah Morris, Karl Neubacher, Christiane Peschek, Sophie Reinhold, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Lucie Stahl, Hito Steyerl and Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, Heimo Zobernig and others.