‘cold cut’
›Cold cuts‹, this is an assortment of sliced, cold, cooked meats arranged on a platter. One can (and should) take this title to indicate that the book you are holding offers a representative cross-section through Ellenrieder’s work in recent years. His interests, strategies and topics are wide-ranging, so that countless aspects of his work can be shown here, carefully laid out and ready for your delectation. However, it is not only the diversity of the proffering that correlates to the culinary concept of sliced meats on a platter. Cold cuts are the cunning transformation of a natural product into an abstracted, artificial form, sometimes possessing significant ornamental character. Cold cuts are also the presence of the macrocosm inside the microcosm. Within the smallest space every conceivable body part of every conceivable animal has been carefully prepared and shaped into an aesthetic whole. This procedure appears often in Ellenrieder’s work. Again and again he transposes natural objects into the realms of the abstract and artificial, doing it in such a way that the corporeal origins are not denied – as in the platter of cold cuts – but in a manner that also draws an unusual amount of our attention to the formal qualities. And time after time, in an apparently microscopically small space, the vegetable and the animal, nature and artefact, the whole and the fragmentary, the innocent and the obscene coalesce and merge into an astoundingly consistent juxtaposition.
The platter is served. Enjoy your meal! (Roger Fayet)
Publisher Revolver – Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, published by Stefan Wimmer Texts Roger Fayet, Hubertus Gaßner, Reinhard Spieler, Margit Zuckriegl und Thomas Palzer (deutsch/englisch) Design gestaltet von Pirmin Veit Book Mit 96 Vierfarb-Abbildungen im Offsetdruck Binding Fadenheftung und Hardcover Size 22 × 29 cm Pages 96 Seiten Run Auflage 800 Year ISBN ISBN 978-3-937577-05-0
