Detail of Flowers, 2021, encaustic on panel, 160 x 240 x 9 cm

A “logical picture” differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for.

- Mitchell Anderson, A provisional theory of these searched out objects, 2016

Zurich-based American artist Mitchell Anderson (b. 1985) uses existing objects and imagery in a body of work that explores contemporary and historical contradictions, the humor and tragedies of existence. In a broad multi-media practice Anderson presents contemplative objects of collective hope and failure and questions the narrative capabilities and codes of the visual and physical.

Mitchell Anderson's body of work is about appropriation and re-appropriation of found objects and images. In his latest series Flower Paintings, Anderson references to Andy Warhol's homonimous 1964 series, as well as Christopher Wool's cartoonish flowers, Michel Majerus and the ancestral tradition of still life painting with its embedded readings of sex and death.

Rosebud (eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen), 2021, encaustic on panel, 160 x 480 x 8 cm, installation view, Lose Enden, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, 2021

The Flower Paintings continue his work begun with the Rosebud series on the ancient technique of encaustic - a paint made from pigment mixed with melted beeswax and resin and after application fixed by heat.

The technique requires an intense physical labour to heat resin and beeswax with natural pigment, while the attention is brought to the feeling of brushstrokes and bodies.

Thought of as a monochrome but also as a sculpture, each of the paintings reflects on the possibilities of the technique and displays the motif in more or less abstract ways.

By employing imagery appropriated from mass culture, Anderson opens up the Pandora box of our imaginary museum.

Installation view of [erp], Efremidis Gallery, Berlin, 2021

Anderson has previously worked with the mediums of neon signs and hand-embroidery.

The Join neon signs series was recently displayed in two solo exhibitions, [erp] at Efremidis Gallery in Berlin (2021), alongside with the video Las Hilanderas (James S. Brady Briefing Room, White House, USA February 25, 2020) and A Partial Gift at Galerie Maria Bernheim (2020).

Installation view of A Partial Gift, Galerie Maria Bernheim, Zurich, 2020

Each neon is unique, displayed in a row as the found image they refer to, and takes on a very pop, out of context imagery - closer to the idea of a light store or a gay bar. The feeling of belonging, recalled by the word “Join”, often has a human and material cost of what this individual could bring to a group in exchange for the privilege of affiliation.

Installation view, Situation 1 und andere, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland, 2020

“Paradox and ambiguity are the building blocks of narrative culture”

Works exhibited at Kunsthalle Basel (2020), Converso (2019) and Kunsthalle Fribourg (2017) show Anderson's singular way of dealing with the legacy of the readymade object and the appropriated image.

Installation view of Moon Piece, The Apostle and Related Works, Converso, Milan, 2019

Hosted at Converso, in a sixteenth-century deconsecrated church, Moon Piece, The Apostle and Related Works was a 2019 exhibition about faith (about its production, propagation and absence), about how it is, often, conveyed by a magical or fetishistic investment on objects in which we project some form of redemption.

Mitchell Anderson (b. 1985 Chicago, USA) currently lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.

Recent institutional exhibitions include Fondazione Converso, Milan (2019) and Fri-Art Kunsthalle Fribourg (2017). Recent institutional group exhibitions include Kunsthalle Bern (2021), Kunsthalle Zürich (2020), Kunsthalle Basel (2020) and MAMCO, Geneva (2019). In 2021 he is nominated for the Prix Mobilière 2021 and the Swiss Art Awards 2021.

He is a frequent contributor of criticism to a variety of international arts publications and has operated the project space Plymouth Rock, in Zürich, since 2014.