18.09.21-21.11.21

Sir Güdel

Not afraid of

The evasive forms of The Woman with the Pig Child* evaporate towards the ceiling of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Flashes, made up of fragments of childhood memories and pornographic images, crackle. Entire sections of memory escape from the gaping wound opened in the eyebrow arch of a visitor lying on the ground. The scent of Monsieur Propre (winter freshness) floods his olfactory nerves. The scent of the blue product, a version with cleaning power twice as effective as the yellow version, joins the smell of hemoglobin which is already oxidizing. A curious dripping drips from the unfortunate man’s lippy mouth. Death, saliva, blood come together in a cursed artistic trio to create an ephemeral work on the shiny parquet floor of the museum, Viennese actionism style.

The Offhause Museum has the immense privilege of hosting Sir Güdel’s new exhibition. This new intervention by the artist in an institution is not trivial. Indeed, this comes after the tragic death of a visitor who occurred in front of a painting by Sir Güdel last summer in the Netherlands. The observation was quickly painted by the press, the headlines plastered:
GÜDEL’S PAINT CAN KILL! IS THE VISION OF THE ARTIST’S WORK OF ALL SUPERLATIVES LETHAL?

Despite the undeniable power and virtuosity emanating from Sir Güdel's pictorial work, it has now been proven that the deceased visitor was already greatly diminished by the new British variant of Covid-19. The autopsy will subsequently reveal that the victim was devastated by a terrible stroke.

Sir Güdel returns with his colorful sandwiches, brought together exclusively at the Offhause Museum, under the title Not afraid of, a reference to Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III, by Barnett Newman*. Imperturbable, as usual, Güdel stands up like a marble statue in the face of criticism. According to him, the incident remains minor in comparison to the artistic terrorist attack perpetrated by Gerard Jan van Bladeren in 1986. The heinous act of vandalism which transformed Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III into a pitiful relaxed Fontana.
Text by Renaud Loda

* Oil on canvas by Sir Güdel produced in 2020 (180x150cm). It is currently in a private collection in Berlin.

**The abstract expressionist was referring to the play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? written by Edward Albee in the 1960s.