Toys Redux – On Play and Critique. Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich.

Press release: The group exhibition brings together artists who make creative use of formats and imagery from popular culture usually addressed to children or teenagers. Such adoptions and manipulations of motifs from video games, television shows, movies, and cartoons should not be seen as mere pop-cultural quotations: they simultaneously comment on the capitalist production of these consumer worlds. Their pop aesthetic and the promise of an "innocent" and playful universe of childlike fantasy contrast with the underlying reality of neoliberal advertising and marketing strategies. The thematic exhibition unfolds a dialogue between works by artists from several generations, including selected pieces from the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst's own collections, and expands on one of the museum's ongoing central themes previously explored in shows by Cory Arcangel (2005), Marvin Gaye Chetwynd (2007), and Alex Bag (2011) as well as Deterioration, They Said (2009).

Lily van der Stokker

Claus Richter

Julia Wachtel

Julia Wachtel

Julia Wachtel

Dawn Mellor

Dawn Mellor (detail)

Timur Si-Qin

Judith Bernstein

Danny McDonald (l). Judith Bernstein (r).

Vittorio Brodmann

Vittorio Brodmann

Vittorio Brodmann

Danny McDonald

Simon Denny

 Artists Included: Cory Arcangel – Alex Bag & Patterson Beckwith – Judith Bernstein – Vittorio Brodmann – Marvin Gaye Chetwynd – Simon Denny – Harun Farocki – Jan Peter Hammer – Nic Hess – Danny McDonald – Dawn Mellor – Claus Richter – Tabor Robak – Timur Si-Qin –Michael Smith – Lily van der Stokker – Julia Wachtel – Hannah Weinberger