ST. GALLEN.- Lamps, furniture, bicycles, typography, museum plinths: Mathieu Mercier’s artistic creation moves masterfully between the categories of art and everyday culture, reflecting the concepts of twentieth-century Western culture, particularly those of the modern age, in the area of conflict between architecture, design and art. The exhibition in St.Gallen’s Lokremise is Mercier’s first in a Swiss museum and primarily presents the artist’s latest works.

Again and again, he reaches back to the artistic avant-garde – to heroes like Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian – and combines their gestures and pictorial inventions by means of the targeted displacement of everyday objects from the present. In a permanent exchange between high and low, Mercier enigmatically queries the status of things between functionality and artistic purposelessness by, for instance, creating benches from pipes used in construction or transforming sports equipment into monstrous lights.

In St.Gallen too, the artist will give expression to the pleasure he takes in transforming materials and objects and using them in novel ways through new, spectacular works. From time to time, Mercier recreates otherwise so impressive natural spectacles in a museum environment – there’s plenty to be excited about!

The artist, who was born in 1970 in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine and who lives in Paris, was awarded the renowned Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2003. Since then, his creations have been showcased in numerous institutions, including the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2007 and the Kunsthalle Nürnberg in 2008.

The exhibition is being staged in cooperation with Villa Merkel, Esslingen, and the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard for contemporary art.

Curator: Konrad Bitterli