Rita McBride's oeuvre embraces a diverse range of themes playfully linking the fields of culture, art, politics and society in a creative, poetic and critical way, cycling and expanding in various materials and scales. Her exhibition at the Konrad Fischer Galerie Düsseldorf, entitled Generatives, is a spirited gathering of collaborative and deliberate works from several decades as well as newly found objects inspired from the pavements of the proverbial Main Street USA.
For Rita McBride, it is of fundamental importance to consider art itself as a generative model, a model that has the power or function of generating, originating, producing or reproducing. Being able to freely navigate between disciplines and generations are of central importance here. In her work she is also developing support structures for other artists, the starting point for fundamental conceptual beginnings, like in her large-scale installation Arena (now on view at Dia:Beacon, New York) and it’s inherent programming.
Freedoms, both artistic and spoken, are central to the imperatives of every community, every democracy. In today's world, these freedoms are increasingly coming under pressure. In this context and in the current climate of global geopolitical tensions, wars and societal divisions, the system-relevant value of art is once again brought to the point of debate. At the same time, these debates are susceptible to the influence of conspiring narratives that are reported and circulated and replicated.
On the first floor, cycles of information circulation are linked by various works: reconditioned and transformed found objects in form of boxes for free publications or newspapers made of black and white metal. A revolving door (Threshold), in which there is a small bronze sculpture of a whispering hunchback, is both, connecting and dividing the two exhibition spaces. A hybrid lectern (Tulip Pulpit) is inspired from a story about a display structure found in the studio of the architect Luis Barragán where it is said that he had placed provocative drawings, reproductions and favorite objects on a special pedestal inviting visitors to take something from the selection home with them and replace it with something that they thought of worthy value to contribute. On the adjacent wall we find a management podium equipped with a microphone and windscreen (Testing 1, 2, 3) and the Mini Managers referring to a series of earlier works such as the Middle Managers (structures that support electrical transmission and connection).
On the second floor, a text work by Lawrence Weiner is piggybacked on a white tunnel made of lightweight scrim material entitled Pharmakon, which, in Greek, means both elixir and poison. This collaborative work, titled Piggybackback, is accompanied by a line of industrial tubes that would normally protect electric wiring, quarried from Carrara marble (Marble Conduits).
The front building contains works by the artist from 1992 to 2008 in a wide variety of materials: a Hanging Plant (1992) made of Murano glass, an ensemble arranged of two wrought iron, bronze and copper city plans, Settlements, Marfa and Caiba, and the famous „Plan Obus“ by Le Corbusier in white Neon, titled A little dust. These works are accompanied by very colourful Templates, the burgundy-red Awning made of Aluminum and vinyl, a bronze Parking Garage and Skylights made of Aluminum.
Rita McBride, born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1960, is an artist and educator living in Düsseldorf and the USA. Her work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions and can be found in the collections of major museums around the world. Her numerous public projects deal with communities and politics in the USA and Europe. Rita McBride has been a professor of art and architecture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf since 2003 and was its rector between 2012 and 2017. Her large-scale works can currently be seen at the Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, New York, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California, and previously at Museum De Pont in Tilburg, Netherlands, the Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, Germany and WIELS in Brussels, Belgium.
