Thomas Mailaender attracted attention with his Chicken Museum exhibition at the 2011 Rencontres d’Arles (see here), but the majority of this troublemaker’s work had been on display for years in titles by RVB Books, a publishing house that recently opened a gallery and bookstore in Paris.
In Extreme Tourism and Cathedral Cars, Mailaender plowed the furrow of the absurd. For Gone Fishing, his latest work, Mailaender shows excerpts from a fictitious correspondence between a woman and a man fleeing his new responsibilities as a father, which the artist alternates with photographs of the activities in which this reluctant adult takes refuge: fishing, swimming with dolphins, etc.
There’s something reminiscent of the LOLcat era in Mailaender’s work, an inspiration also explored by Ruth van Beek at RVB Books. In The Hibernators, she cuts and bends images of guinea pigs, rabbits, cats and dogs to create a new stuffed animal hybrid: hibernators, animals that look the same from the front and back, and which seem destined for a life of comfort, wedged between two cushions. This attempt to tame the wilderness by twisting it to her own purposes is similar to Thomas Mailaender’s, who appears in a Hawaiian shirt, surfing a wave of lava.
Antoine Soubrier
The RVB Books is opened here :
95, rue Julien Lacroix
75020 Paris
From Wednesday to Saturday 2pm – 7pm
First exhibition with Paul Kooiker.
