Confounding viewers’ expectations of space and place are integral to the installations and architectural interventions that are part-and-parcel of conceptual artist Mandla Reuter’s artistic practice. An alumnus of the Städelschule, Academy of Fine Arts in Frankfurt/Main, Reuter creates site-specific, ephemeral works often through simple means that challenge the illusionism and spectacle produced by today’s globalized culture industry.

Reuter simultaneously reduces and expands the concept of the work by making space itself, as well as media (such as exhibition catalogues and invitation cards) the subjects of his artistic practice. He is especially interested in space with respect to its institutional and architectural framing. Be it a gallery or a private space, Reuter exploits their various determinations (open/closed, functional/representative, public/private) only to shift these categories. His minimalist spatial interventions, which have involved manipulating a gallery’s interior lighting system so that all the lights turn on and off at irregular intervals, or playing a movie soundtrack through an open closet door that is not typically part of the exhibition area, disrupt the elementary functions of the space and our perceptions of it.

Yet, sometimes it is simply the access to a place that Reuter provides, obstructs, or withholds. For Invitation (2005), a work he produced with Alexander Wolff, the artists distributed 500 copies of the keys to a private apartment in Warsaw, along with an invitation noting the address to friends and other interested parties, that effectively provided formerly private access to the apartment to a heterogeneous and in the end uncontrollable group. In contrast, Ohne Titel (2006), denied access to the exhibition space with a huge rock, a gesture that rendered the show itself accessible only through a back door entrance.

Another recurring element in Reuter’s work is his interest in the parameters of Hollywood’s movie industry. The diverse foci of the artist’s interests were made visible in his latest solo exhibition Isolated Human Particles Floating Weightlessly Through a Magnetic Field of Fabricated Pleasure, Occasionally Colliding (2005) where he subtly attacked the slippery illusionism produced by Hollywood through deconstructing mechanisms of cultural staging.

Reuter not only expresses his highly conceptual approach to art in his installations, but he also curated exhibitions in Buenos Aires, Pigment Piano Marble (2006), and Dresden Reuter (2004), and published a novel, Tokyo Panda (2004).

- Chus Martinez