Liverpool artwork of the day – Friday December 14 2007. ‘Mirage’ 1999 by Michael Raedecker. Acrylic, thread and sequins on linen. In The Walker (20th Century and contemporary gallery)
As an undergraduate Michael Raedecker studied fashion, and his experience of the properties of thread and techniques of sewing have underpinned the evolution of this distinctive painting style. Painting and thread are combined to form images in which opposing characteristics play off each other to maximum aesthetic effect.
The bi-polar sensations of virtuosity and vacuity operating in the work inform the image itself, a panoramic (post-holocaustal?) desert landscape whose disjunctures and ambiguities of dimension give the effect of being seen in a dream. With the inner logic of hallucination, passages of hypnotic detail and microscopic, perhaps consciously repellent life butt against areas which are by turn vague and jokily surreal.
Michael Raedecker was born in Amsterdam in 1963. He studied at Gerrit Rievelt Academie Amsterdam and Goldsmiths College. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2000.