The Breeder
Vlassis Caniaris - Art Basel 2010

June 15, 2010–June 20, 2010
Basel, Switzerland

The Breeder participates in Art 41 Basel with the presentation of Vlassis Caniaris’ historical installation Boudoir / Room (1974).

Boudoir was created in the context of the body of works titled “Immigrants: Guest Workers – Foreign Workers” and an exhibition series of the same name from the mid 1970’s which toured in Kunstverein Heidelberg, in Kunstverein Ingolstadt, in Museum Bochum, in Hannover Kunstverein but also London’s ICA (1976). That exhibition was one of the earliest interventions in the art domain against the German model of “guest labour” and moreover described the migrants’ living conditions. The 1974 catalogue, produced for the “Immigrants” exhibition in “Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst” (Berlin), states: “Vlassis Caniaris presents the lives of the foreign workers as not recognizable, not comprehensible. In the eyes of their hosts, the guest workers seem to be waste.” However, Caniaris also adds elements of dreaming or yearning, as found in “Boudoir”, a picture executed as if from a child’s perspective. With its wallpaper, the newspapers, the hanging towels and the vacuum cleaner, “Boudoir” does not realistically replicate a room. On the contrary, Caniaris transformed these disparate elements into signifiers of a hypothetical life by his particularised arrangement, that, in its sparseness, recalls the standard of living endured by so many.

Caniaris was part of Nouveau Réalistes, a movement that Pierre Restany, the theoretical founder of it, described as a “poetic recycling of reality”. Other characteristics of New Realism that are traced in Caniaris’ works are the use of found objects and their political subject matter.