Max Grau
Demolished Beauty // or: Mallorca
2019

The Mojave desert, now technically under rule of a totalitarian government?

Hugging Alex, a young homeless man, because before he worked up the courage to ask you for money, you found yourself having an actual conversation about Extinction Rebellion and the fact that maybe there are reasons to be hopeful afterall, and you felt this real moment of deep connection to this person – who is about your age (hard to tell), who will probably spend the night having to work around London’s omnipresent defensive architecture – and only a few moments after this brief but hyper-intense encounter: crashing, feeling silly and ashamed, wondering wether you only hugged him because you want to be the type of person who does things like that?

The one time you tried to go on a vacation with your partner but found yourself unable to relax, nerves shattered by constant money struggles and the creeping realization that your relationship might be over?

A multistory pig farm at the Yaji Mountain Forest Park in Guangxi province, China?

Your cat, proudly offering a chewed up robin as a gift?

Grant Hart’s smile and voice and Pete Doherty’s hair?

Doing Ecstasy while dog sitting?

Berlin-Mitte?

Sleeping with your best friend?

Working on an art project for months, putting everything you have in it, every shred of what makes you a person, stressing out, losing your mind in panic wether you will finish in time, wether you’ll have a nervous breakdown, wether anybody will be able to relate to the work, wether it’s too sad, constantly flaking out on your friends because you feel unable to deal with anything other than this stupid project and then, when you somehow managed to pull it off: such a harsh comedown, feeling all empty, like you can never ever go through this again… or: ›post-project-blues‹?

The fact that you’ll never be able to tell, wether the notion of ›Demolished Beauty‹ stirs up mental images in other people as well?

This island everybody says is actually beautiful, although it is constantly invaded by beer-bellied German tourists in shorts, eager to fuck?

Soviet-style socialism?

Nan Goldin’s ›The Ballad of Sexual Dependency‹?

Instantly panicking, once you realize you’re about to fall in love, because what are the chances that this one time it’s gonna be something other than a complete disaster?

Virginia Woolf, on a Thursday in 1941, writing:
»I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been«?


Exhibitions

Demolished Beauty x Mallorca
Rachel Fäth, Max Grau, Barbara Hainz, Axel Koschier, Angelika Loderer, Flavio Palasciano, Stefan Reiterer, Liesl Raff
23.07. — 31.08.2019