Michael Schirner: Bye bye (German Edition)

“My art is not my work; you are the creator of your image in your head. I do not exist at all.” Those are the words of Michael Schirner, Germany’s “pope of advertising.” In his oeuvre, Schirner treats the visual worlds of mass culture and high culture as well as the perception of images communicated via media. He does not create new images. His images are images about images. Magazines, newspapers, films, television, the internet, advertising, and art are his image archives. Schirner works and reworks that which is stored in our collective memory. The goal of his work is to make the invisible visible. He reduces the elements of the image to a minimum, leaving everything out that can be left out. The result: the audience imagines the reduced. What is not shown is created in the viewers’ heads. Schirner has faith in the imagination and thinking of the viewers, thus making them the real authors of the work. His art is communication. This book shows his latest series, BYE BYE: thirty-two coarse halftone reproductions of images that appear vexingly familiar to us, even though we have never seen them in this form. We are torn between the familiar and unfamiliar, the visible and the invisible, the real and the unreal, memory and forgetting, illusion and reality, original and fake. BYE BYE includes a foreword by Dirk Luckow and texts by Oliver Koerner von Gustorf, Hans Ulrich Reck, Ingo Taubhorn, and Brigitte Werneburg as well as an interview with Markus Peichl and Michael Schirner.