Wolf Vostell

German Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell is known as a pioneer of décollage and as one of the first artists to use television as a medium. His work generates discussion on social and political events through an emphasis on the resonance of materials such as the moving image, text, concrete, and found objects. His use of concrete, for instance, has connotations with postwar urbanism, German reconstruction, American urban renewal, and the Cold War. His use of video and television is a comment on mass media and consumerism. Vostell's 1963 work Sun in your head (Television Décollage) is made from television clips of women, men, and airplanes infused with text that reads “silence, genius at work.” Here images are blurred and partially destroyed, leaving behind spliced references to mass media.

Vostell’s work has been exhibited in group and solo shows internationally, including Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim, Verbeke Foundation, Belgium, National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, Carré d'Art, Nîmes, Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and MoMA, New York.