Rheingold. Zeichnungen brings together the drawings of German artist’s Alex Wissel’s group of works Rheingold, which is inspired by the figure of the art consultant Helge Achenbach, who was convicted of fraud in 2015. According to the judges’ reasoning, the art consultant had been guilty of fraud by manipulating invoices. In the most absurd moments of the trial, Achenbach referred to the falsified invoices as a collage and thus to himself as an artist, so to speak. The drawings take this moment of the trial as an opportunity to reflect on the genesis of neoliberal reality in Germany. They can be read as an alternative (art) historiography of the last 25 years of the country. The central question: How did the Beuys dictum: “Everyone is an artist” become the “Ich-AG”, a notorious term that has been coined in the early noughties to describe a policy of turning unemployed into one-person entrepreneurs?

Text by: Hans-Jürgen Hafner, Kea Wienand