Tony Conrad

MAMCO, Geneva
Oct 5, 2021 – Jan 30, 2022

Tony Conrad (1940-2016) had made discreet but essential contributions to contemporary culture. His work takes the form of diverse interventions in widely differing cultural spheres: music, cinema, video, painting, teaching, and media activism. From a systematically marginal standpoint, he pursued a mission to question cultural codes and institutions perceived as normative and authoritarian; encompassing authorship, musical composition, camerawork and editing in film, perspective and the media. Merging radical critic and wit humor, he elaborated an idiosyncratic oeuvre that defies classifications.

From the mid-1990s until his death in 2016, Conrad revisited his work as a whole, in a process of unification. He gave concerts and lectures worldwide, and embarked on new series of works. The MAMCO exhibition sets out to retrace his career over nearly sixty years of cultural activism, while at the same time acknowledging the artist’s stance vis-à-vis the methodologies underpinning the display of his work in contemporary art institutions.

The exhibition, organized by Balthazar Lovay, is a collaboration with Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Culturgest, Lisbon, and is based on the retrospective of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2018–2019).

For more information, please visit MAMCO's website.