DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM is pleased to present our first show with MONTY RICHTHOFEN (aka Maison Hefner). Titled CHEAP HEDONISM, the exhibition includes an immersive light and sound experience in collaboration with Yasmina Dexter in the main subterranean gallery space, and will be accompanied by a new series of text paintings and works on paper. The exhibition opens on Friday, January 20, 2023, from 6–8 PM and is on view through March 4, 2023. The gallery and the artist will host a finissage event on Friday, March 3, 2023, with a unique activation of the installation.

Visitors arriving at the gallery are welcomed by a large-format painting; letters on a luminous red ground spell the exhibition’s title: CHEAP HEDONISM. The sounds of a twenty-minute multimedia installation can be heard from downstairs and guide the visitors toward the gallery’s underground exhibition space. In the anteroom leading to the main gallery, papers reminiscent of square notepads, mounted under acrylic glass covers, reveal intimate notes, phrases, and poetic fragments in Richthofen’s hand. Confronted with the artist’s unfiltered thoughts, the visitors are invited to delve into a reflection on their own feelings and thoughts.

The exhibition’s centerpiece is set up in the main gallery. The installation titled If This Is You Who Am I consists of seven lightboxes spray-painted with acrylic paint that pulse in the rhythm of a two-channel sound file by Yasmina Dexter. Richthofen recorded the texts reproduced on the light boxes; Dexter then subjected the recordings to acoustic manipulation. In the course of the piece, the artist’s spoken words eventually become more and more clearly audible.

Life is not bad at all—perhaps even better?—somewhere in the capitalist system’s interstices. In an age of unbridled consumerism, advancing globalization, and constant availability, we need to subject conventional values to ongoing critical scrutiny. Monty Richthofen’s solo show CHEAP HEDONISM exposes the pitfalls of social life, builds bridges, allows for vulnerabilities. Exuding a sense of ease, it encourages the visitors to linger and immerse themselves in a place where words in their immediacy evoke a poetics of the everyday dreamt up with eyes open or closed.

Richthofen dedicates himself to pop-cultural phenomena and life’s profound questions alike, his playful engagement with language undeterred by seemingly unrecognizable paradoxes, sending shafts of bright light down into reality’s putatively dark fractures.

Photography by Jens Ziehe

PRESS

Tagesspiegel
Frieze