Kalender

Adam Harrison: The Painting Game

Sunday, May 18, 2025, 2 pm – 5 pm

Artist talk: 5.15 pm

 

The Painting Game (2025) is a work of art designed in the form of a game by Canadian artist Adam Harrison. As a portable board game, it can be played in a wide variety of places – such as schools, parks, cafés, trains, or at the workplace. It contains watercolors, paintbrushes, water reservoirs, paper, dice, and playing cards with creative directions. Other materials not included in the box may also be spontaneously incorporated into the game. It can be played by one or more people, and is designed for all ages.

The Painting Game invites its players to collectively contemplate the tasks suggested by a set of playing cards. Regardless of artistic experience and self-confidence in one’s own artistic abilities, the game immediately initiates the creative process. It offers tools for overcoming artistic inhibitions and encourages communication with the direct environment, creating space for reflection and communal moments. The result of each game is a painting that the players can take home with them as their own work of art.

As part of International Museum Day on May 18, 2025, The Painting Game will be presented to the public for the first time on a large scale. We invite all visitors to the Fridericianum to play and get creative: They can join in and create their own artwork at prepared game tables. Sets with instructions and playing cards are available in different languages. In this way, The Painting Game creates a democratic space where everyone is welcome and free to experiment. This emphasizes the value of play as a way to have fun, relax, ponder, and fantasize, and the Kunsthalle will be open as a multifaceted place of experience. The idea of games as artistic medium has roots in Dada, Surrealism, and the Fluxus movement. In the course of the latter, artists such as George Brecht and George Maciunas developed small-scale game sets in large editions, creating a counterpoint to the elitist art world and a connection between art and life.

Adam Harrison was born in 1983 in Vancouver, Canada. After studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2009–2014), he founded the Studio for Propositional Cinema, an artist entity that staged numerous exhibitions from 2013 until its dissolution in 2023. These included monographic presentations at Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach (2022), Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples, Italy (2019), Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland (2018), Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover (2018), Swiss Institute Contemporary Art in New York, USA (2017), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf (2016), and Bonner Kunstverein (2016).

Language artist talk: English. Admission is free. No registration required.