Press
Eclectic Affinities Hamid Zénati and the Collection of the Museum Angewandte Kunst
28 September 2024 – 12 January 2025
Press conference: Thursday, 26 September 2024, 11 am
Opening: Friday, 27 September 2024, 7 pm
Eclectic Affinities brings the extensive work of the artist Hamid Zénati, who was born in Constantine (Algeria) in 1944 and died in Munich in 2022, into dialogue with various objects from the collection of the Museum Angewandte Kunst. With his all-over stencil technique, Zénati developed a distinct formal language and created compositions that were both playful and powerful. His paintings on textiles and ceramics, as well as his approach to photography, challenge established boundaries and genres by moving between the realms of design, art, and interior design.
Zénati’s work resonates with the museum’s central questions: What is applied art today? Where is the boundary with the fine arts? Do our learned hierarchies, categories of knowledge, and viewing habits do justice to a diverse world? Eclectic Affinities sets different focal points in nine chapters and enables new perspectives on the work of an individualist and autodidact whose obsevations of social, cultural and artistic movements organically flowed into his work. The exhibition also elicits unconventional approaches to the collection objects selected by the curators in relation to Zénati’s work. Loans from the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art and the Walther Collection (Neu-Ulm/New York) create further points of reference.
Curators: Dr. Mahret Ifeoma Kupka and Anna Schneider
Eclectic Affinities. Hamid Zénati and the Collection of the Museum Angewandte Kunst
The artist never stretched his works on stretcher bars. He preferred to spontaneously lay them out in his surrounding or to stage them in photographs as performative sculptures, here in Indonesia in the 1990s.
Photo: Hamid Zénati
© Hamid Zénati Estate
Please note that the image material may only be used in conjunction with a report on the exhibition and with the citation of the exhibition title in its entirety.