Works 7

Swiss-American graphic designer, musician, photographer and performance artist Mike Hentz ranks among the pioneers of new media art. He co-founded the legendary performance group Minus Delta T and the artist groups Frigo, Radio Bellevue and the European Media Art Lab. In the 1990s he realized the project Piazza Virtuale with Van Gogh TV and a great many interactive cable and satellite television shows with Universcity TV. Hentz also taught at art schools in Germany, Switzerland and various Eastern European countries. Works 7 is a very special overview of Hentz’s work: snapshots from all over the world, paintings, collages, graphic and ornamental works, and various artifacts from the artist’s collections, which include everything from old magazines to fabric patterns. Interconnected and mutually illuminating, Hentz’s works are multifunctional, incessantly morphing and re-emerging in all sorts of different contexts: a painting may be hung on a wall or used in a video lecture, a projected snapshot becomes part of an installation, existing works are scanned and reworked. Hentz’s aggregate work-in-progress is reconstructed in an associative order in this encyclopedic, excessive book that highlights every aspect of his wide-ranging oeuvre.