Andrea Fraser  ohne Titel

In her first ever gallery exhibition that took place at our gallery in Cologne in 1990, 25-year-old Andrea Fraser showed a retrospective. It consisted of four posters of works of art from the Metropolitan Museum that were overprinted with Fraser's own texts, three laughing and three pouting smileys made of aluminum (which Martin Kippenberger immediately bought at the opening as comments on his own works), the video work "Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk" and texts by the artist screen-printed on the wall. The exhibition took place in November, coinciding with Art Cologne Fair . That is why the "retrospective" was contextualized in an exactly replicated booth of Art Cologne in the gallery on Brabanterstrasse. "Invited to Cologne for the first one-woman gallery exhibition of her career, the artist set out to produce a genealogy of her precocious reception in Germany. Scheduled during the Cologne Art Fair, in which the gallery did not participate that year, the Galerie Christian Nagel was redecorated to look like an art fair booth with the same furniture, wall, and floor covering employed at the fairgrounds. The gallery was then installed with a 'retrospective' of the artist’s meager production to date. The installation was conceived as a stage set for the black binder placed on the desk in the gallery, a component of the show often referred to as the 'Cologne Presentation Book‘.(…)The documentation begins in 1990 and moves backwards trough the fall of the Berlin wall; exhibitions of German and American Neo-Expressionism in the 1980s; visits to Germany by Bush, Reagan, Nixon, and Kennedy; German demonstrations against the US in the 1980s and 1960s; the establishment of the Cologne Art Fair and the market for American Pop Art; the exhibitions of American art circulated by the Museum of Modern Art in the 1950s and 1960s; (...)“ (from: "Andrea Fraser“, exh.cat., 2015, Museum Der Moderne Salzburg , edited by Sabine Breitwieser)