Doppelte Buchführung

Doppelte Buchführung is a collection of 248 collages created by German artist Thomas Baldischwyler based on black-and-white copies of the 2004 catalog Formalism. Moderne Kunst heute, published in 2004. His analog reworking of this documentation of the group exhibition, which took place that same year at the Hamburger Kunstverein, consists of interweaving various layers of history and narratives. Through the use of isometric grids borrowed from postmodern architecture, gestural watercolor washes, and photographic prints and texts secured with ephemeral-looking metal staples, the translucent fragments of the original become casual foundations for roughly superimposed layers of his own artistic biography. During production in 2020, the year of the pandemic, Baldischwyler focused primarily on the dichotomy of local versus global: The introductory and supplementary material in the publication, written in English, signals a willingness to communicate internationally, while a substantial portion of the text—typed mechanically in German for technical reasons—pushes the multilingual aspect to the point of absurdity, thereby referencing the local origins of artistic production.

Authors and interviewees contributing to the book, in the order of their appearance: Miriam Stoney, Nina Lucia Groß, Raphael Dillhof, Laszlo Glozer, Thomas Jeppe, Takeo Marquardt, Stephan Dillemuth, Kerstin Stakemeier, and the editors.