Pavel Büchler

Pavel Büchler is an artist, lecturer and writer. Summing up his own practice as "making nothing happen", he is committed to the catalytic nature of art - its potential to draw attention to the obvious and reveal it as strange. Formally presented in a variety of media including extinct technology, audio recordings, light and texts, Büchler’s witty works structure around theories of photography and film, artists’ books, experimental pedagogies of art and the articulation between art and political culture. His ideas are represented by way of sampling and erasing information, and patiently composed with the attitude of a diligent scrivener as it can be noticed in The List (2003) and Previous Correspondence (2006), which are 242 personalised replies to the senders of direct-mail promotional letters received between 2001 and 2006. Language plays a key role in the former Czechoslovakian artist’s practice. Featuring in either written or spoken form, this intimately relates to his own life or it references systems sourced from literary practice. For instance, in 2006 he transformed Franz Kafka’s The Castle (1926) into a monumental sound piece installed in the façade of Bern Kunsthalle where passages from the novel were read out loud by a computer-generated voice emitted by trumpet speakers designed by Marconi in the same year. Büchler’s fascination with typography, the physicality of the blank page and his interest in questioning the status of the book as an art work comes through in works like Idle Thoughts (2003). This consists of 12 framed notebook pages that contain a month of diary entries overwritten on top of each other until biro marks form a black geometric square. Other projects employ conceptual solutions in the process of openly playing with chance and appropriation strategies of, for instance, reclaimed figurative paintings found in flea markets and at friends’ houses, or of “lost property” as in Short Stories (1996). In this work he recovered remnants of pencils from public libraries in England and Ireland and used them to realise text-based wall drawings, investing these objects with storytelling, or making them speak. Modern Paintings (1997-2004) instead looks like a series of abstract expressionist paintings which are nothing else than found objects reinvested with new life by way of priming, stripping, washing the canvasses as laundry and applying new coats of paint.

Büchler (b. 1952, Prague, Czech Republic), lives and works in Manchester. Forthcoming solo exhibitions this year include Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven) and objectif_exhibitions (Antwerp). Previous exhibitions include a solo at Kunsthalle Bern (2006, CH) and participations in the 9th Istanbul Biennale (2005, Turkey) and the group exhibitions The Grand Promenade (2006), National Museum of Modern Art (Athens); Whatever Happened to Social Democracy? (2005), Rooseum (Malmö); Off-Key, Kunsthalle Bern (2005), Alchemy (2005), The Manchester Museum, UK.

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