Description
Alter Ego was published as the catalogue accompanying MODEM’s exhibition of the same name in Debrecen (28 May – 25 September 2022).
The title itself is mysterious and enigmatic, much like the inscriptions, fragments, quotations, incantations and palindromes—often of foreign origin—that appear in the artist’s works.
The expression “alter ego” literally refers to “the other self”, evoking Arthur Rimbaud’s famous statement: “I is another” (“je est un autre”). Lakner himself refers to this statement in connection with his conceptual series Self-Modellings, in which he used himself as a model to simulate social and existential situations. Throughout his practice, including the works featured in this publication, he frequently models historical and social situations, evoking major figures from cultural history and history more broadly, and reinterpreting documents as large-scale object paintings. By tracing the writing of the Other, making it his own and internalising it, he rewrites the texts of postcards and manuscript pages in both the literal and figurative senses.
In the catalogue, Dávid Fehér’s curatorial introduction provides an overview of the artist’s career; Sarah Wilson focuses primarily on the connections between Lakner and new figurative tendencies; Eckhart Gillen examines the conceptual works and book works; and Thomas Hirsch discusses the phases of the artist’s career in Germany after 1974.