This catalogue is the most comprehensive treatment of Michaela Melián’s oeuvre to date and constitutes, with numerous essays and illustrations, a long due documentation of the German artist’s work. The texts discuss how, since the late 1980s, Melián has consistently pursued a strategy of rendering visible the social—that complex web of power, system, gender, and class—uncovering it, even where it lies buried by familiarity and habit.

“Working within a popcultural framework that unites music, visual culture, and art into one praxis, Michaela Melián (*1956) constructs an oeuvre both haptic and conceptual out of everyday materials. ‘Soft’ or ‘fluid’ images, whose formal principles one might call Claes Oldenburgian, are combined with current critical methods of site-specificity and context analysis to subvert received readings of objects, symbols and history. Melián’s drawings, sculptural objects, and installations frequently focus on themes relating to the construction of gender characteristics and identity. Collapsible or fluid surfaces evolve into materially and spatially sophisticated scenarios in which details of the history of emancipation inhere in a compressed form.” —Dirk Snauwaert