Published to accompany René Daniëls’ 1993 exhibition at Raum Aktueller Kunst in Vienna, this slim catalogue surveys the Dutch painter’s strange, slippery visual language. 

His bow-tie forms that become rooms, stages and perspectival traps; disembodied figures; fragments of text; art-historical references; and images that seem permanently caught between joke, riddle and proposition. The exhibition ran from 26 May to 3 July 1993, and the catalogue contains 40 illustrated pages.

Daniëls emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s with paintings that treated the supposedly exhausted medium as something capable of thinking sideways. His recurring motifs mutate from picture to picture, collapsing distinctions between gallery, theatre, landscape and diagram. There is humour here, but also an odd seriousness about how paintings produce meaning: through repetition, visual puns, quotation and the gap between what an image appears to show and what it refuses to settle into. A particularly nice small catalogue from the period rather than a later retrospective object.

Raum Aktueller Kunst, Vienna, 1993. Exhibition catalogue. Text by Els Hoek. Paperback, 40 pp., illustrated throughout in colour and black and white. Published for the René Daniëls exhibition at Raum Aktueller Kunst Wien, 26 May–3 July 1993. Internally clean and well preserved; binding firm. Very good condition.