P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents Couch Park by Swiss artist and architect Erik Steinbrecher. Curated by P.S.1 Senior Curator Klaus Biesenbach, the exhibition features an installation of new works on paper by Steinbrecher, who extensively collects photographic materials. Couch Park addresses the archiving of knowledge and the concept of image as a structure for evoking creative associations.
Couch Park features complex arrangements of images from Steinbrecher's archive (of over 20,000) on themes including the city, body, nature, technology, sex, and violence as well as installations of large-scale photographs by Steinbrecher himself. Through elaborate and dynamic use of images, he presents a complex system of associations and ideas—the richness and depth of which ultimately depends on the involvement of the viewer's imagination. Taken out of their usual context and given the same emphasis, the sequences of pictures suggest that the events depicted could occur simultaneously.
In the beginning of 2000, Steinbrecher published part of his extensive collection of photos, clippings and reproductions in the magazine COUCH, with which he created an important basis for his work with photographic materials. In July 2000, Steinbrecher was invited to exhibit part of his archive as an installation at Kunst-Werke, Berlin. Over a six-week period, Steinbrecher arranged and re-arranged the archive, allowing the public to follow the process and changes directly.
Erik Steinbrecher (b. 1963) lives and works in Berlin and Zürich. Among other exhibitions, his works were included in Documenta X, Kassel, Germany; Gallery Stampa, Basel, Switzerland; Gallery Walcheturm, Zürich, Switzerland; Gallery Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Germany; Museum Ludwig, Budapest; and Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany.