Angela Grauerholz
Reading Room for the Working Artist

Reading Room for the Working Artist, the result of several years spent collecting, selecting and assembling visual and textual material related to modern art and culture, straddles the boundaries of artistic and curatorial practice. Inspired by Aleksandr Rodchenko’s 1925 Workers’ Club, created for the Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes de Paris, Angela Grauerholz’s installation consists of reading room furniture, a film projection and a series of twelve books containing a wide range of documents (press cuttings, letters, book covers, postcards, reproductions, and artworks).

It invokes the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork), the central artistic concept for most of the artists and authors to which the installation refers – Duchamp, Warhol, Borges, Benjamin, Malraux, Zweig, etc. –, all of whom attempted to achieve a synthesis bewteen art and life. Bringing together various aspects of Angela Grauerholz’s practice, Reading Room for the Working Artist recounts a somewhat utopian yet thoroughly personal history of art and of artists. The installation permits a retrospective look at the very substance of the artist’s methodology, her artistic production, and her reflective process.