Marta Riniker-Radich

This exhibition at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark includes ten selected drawings by artist Marta Riniker-Radich, works that were made over a period of almost ten years and that combine different series and themes from her artistic oeuvre. Here we see that for a long period, the human figure was not a feature of the artist’s drawings, which instead depict buildings and interiors void of people, which gives them a strange and uncanny psychological depth. Most of the motifs have real models or are combinations of a number of fragments from models, whereby these combinations have absurd or violent effects. Collecting, owning, the inherent power of things, and how structures of power, above all masculine, are transferred into architecture — this could be seen as a kind of leitmotiv in the artist’s works of this period. 

The Enemy Within 7 (2017), for example, shows a lock barrel. This work is part of a series that focuses on the theme of security, protectionism, and safe spaces, looking here at a more private partitioned realm, while Riniker-Radich has otherwise addressed the larger realms of industrial security complexes. 

Glenn McCarthy Goes to Sea (2010) is a result of the artist’s interest in the oil industry in America. Glenn McCarthy, an Irish oil dealer, commissioned a wasteful hotel building under the name of Shamrock in Houston. After Frank Lloyd Wright attended the grand opening of the building, he called it an ​“architectural venereal disease,“ his way of criticizing the building’s profligate style, which the artist here also depicts in her drawing by adding exaggerated protuberances to the pillars. 

Untitled (2010) is based on a real place that serves more as a projection surface for the underlying structures of power. Riniker-Radich replicates structures of the Powder Room in Radio City Music Hall in New York, an art deco icon. As in many other works by the artist, natural organic forms are placed into spaces created by humans, suggesting that nature is slowly reconquering these and taking them over.

In The Conservative Treehouse (2018) we see Ikea children’s seating in front of a wall with brown leather covering, looking like a country club, a high-class restaurant, or similar elite private interiors, and a crystal bottle containing a brown liquid on the table. This is clearly a setting in which important agreements and decisions are made, but the children’s seating makes it look ridiculous. The artist here refers to the backscratching and old-boy networks that traditionally meet in this kind of place.

Even if all of the works presented here are more or less autonomous, they nonetheless all address related questions pertaining to personal (in)security in both the psychological and physical sense. The mode of operation of these works is always to contrast and combine, giving these pictures an uncanny and uneasy effect, and sometimes also a sense of humor. 


Left wall (f.l.t.r.)

Glenn McCarthy Goes to Sea, 2010
colored pencil and pencil on paper
21 x 29,7 cm
Courtesy the artist 

The Enemy Within 7, 2017
colored pencil and pencil on paper
21 x 29,7 cm
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich

Untitled, 2010
colored pencil and pencil on paper
21 x 29,7 cm
Courtesy the artist 

A Sidekick Named Snake, 2018
colored pencil on paper 
21 x 29,7 cm
Courtesy M3 collection, Geneva 

Lattementa, 2008
colored pencil and pencil on paper
21 x 29,7 cm
Courtesy the artist 


Right wall (f.l.t.r.)

The Conservative Treehouse, 2018
Colored pencil and pencil on paper
21 x 29,7 cm
Courtesy the artist 

Little Shop of Horrors, 2011
colored pencil, pencil and collage on paper
21 x 29,7 cm
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich 

Untitled, 2010
colored pencil and pencil on paper
21 x 29,7 cm
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich

Untitled, 2008
colored pencil and pencil on paper
21 x 29,7 cm
Courtesy Collection Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain, Geneva 

An Unattainable Memory, 2019
colored pencil, pencil on paper
21 x 29,7 cm
Courtesy the artist and gallery Francesca Pia, Zurich