EXHIBITION COLOGNE

Kunsträume der Michael Horbach Stiftung
 
June 29—July 27, 2025

For over a century, artists have repeatedly declared the death of art. From the first avant-gardes to conceptualism’s final acts, each generation has wrestled with the suspicion that all forms have been exhausted, all gestures performed. But what happens when an artist takes this pronouncement quite literally – when death is not the end of art, but art’s very core?

Morten Viskum’s work begins where many would draw the line. Since the mid-1990s, he has developed a singular body of work that moves across installation, photography, video and painting, often combining these media with elements drawn from medical contexts: human body limbs, internal organs, dead animals, cancer cells, blood. His best-known gesture may be painting with the aid of a dead person’s hand – an act that sparked controversy, headlines, panic attacks and even death threats. Despite contemporary art having accustomed us to seeing almost anything, it is still difficult to consider death a normal art material. Death charges the works that involve it with legal, ethical and religious implications. As a result, many of Viskum’s works have been reported to the police, stolen from exhibitions or censored before reaching the public.

The exhibition opens with an unsettling scene: a life-sized silicone cast of the artist as Vladimir Putin, seated at a table far too long for the brief talks that have taken place there. Emmanuel Macron has just left. On the table, a bottle filled with rat foetuses in formaldehyde; beneath it, vodka spilled over a rainbow flag. Another room, another weird encounter: Viskum as Edvard Munch in the studio at Ekely, surrounded by drawings he made blindfolded. Nearby, a morgue table with a skeleton. What kind of self-portraits are we looking at?

Each year on his birthday, Viskum undergoes the same ritual: a full-body mould is taken in a Paris specialised workshop, later transformed into a hyperreal sculpture with human hair and clothing. He plays with identity, blending his own image with that of someone else, placing himself within a larger cultural narrative. The common denominator among the self-portraits is the theme of finitude. The sculptures arrive in wooden crates, almost like coffins. Seeing one’s own body inert, pale and lifeless is, as his fabricator put it, like rehearsing death. Viskum himself fainted during the making of Immortal (2004), the first work in the series, in which he faces a wall marked with the word IMMORTAL written in blood and varnished to keep it from fading. “Wouldn’t it have been absurd”, he later remarked, “to die at the very moment I was calling myself immortal?”

Running through Viskum’s projects, death is a constant – not as a metaphor or a dramatic pose to chase shock value, but as a concrete presence. His practice turns around a fundamental paradox: death is the most certain event in life, and yet the only one we can never truly experience. It defines us, but it always escapes us. We know death through its aftermath – through mourning, through absence, through the pain of losing someone we love. But we do not know what death is. We cannot describe it, live through it or return from it. It is, for as long as we live, an impossible experience, something we are inevitably separated from. Our cultural, spiritual and social structures are also based on the separation of the living from the dead. For Viskum, art is the ultimate means to challenge this threshold, a sort of space of exception where norms no longer apply. His works are rituals of confrontation with what is bound to remain unspeakable, untouchable, inviolable.

Death becomes palpable in the last room with Tante Karen – a series of abstract paintings on embroidered doilies and lacework, named after Edvard Munch’s aunt. The works are not paintings in the conventional sense, but traces of a performance carried out with a severed hand clutching brushes and pencils. For this piece, Viskum chose hand no. 6 from his own collection – tiny, old and female. Each hand feels different through the surgical glove he wears to handle them, making sure he does not touch the formalin used to preserve the amputated limbs.

Perhaps the most singular aspect of these performances is their ambivalence: they attract and repel in equal measure. We live in a world hungry for sensation, and many questions inevitably turn to the hands – where they come from, how they were acquired, who they once belonged to. Most of this information cannot be shared. Viskum began collecting his “Old Hands” at the Academy. One day, he just realised he had never used human remains in his work simply because it is forbidden – and thought this boundary might exist only in theory.

Speaking of boundaries, we tend to accept without discomfort that many artists in the past learned anatomy by studying or dismembering cadavers from the morgue. And yet we struggle to come to terms with the fact that someone like Viskum took it a step further. Removing body parts and allowing them to continue acting within the world of the living. Staging, each year, the return of his own lifeless body from a laboratory in Paris. But the artist will not blame us for trembling before the corpses we all shall one day become. He will not judge – that fear is life itself.
 

–Marta Cassina