Toolbox by Sspatz: group exhibition

February 24, 2023 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Join us Friday, February 24th at 6pm to welcome the work of the artist collective Sspatz! 6pm to 9pm

With our newly empty nest at Compound Yellow, we want to fill it with life and art in the spirit of our Hyde Park Home Gallery project this year! We’ll be featuring projects that blur the lines between art and everyday life. To celebrate the new year with kindred spirits, we are excited to show “Toolbox” the work of the artist collective Sspatz!

Since its foundation, sspatz has been all about art in domestic spaces. The starting point has been the need to make contemporary art tangible as part of living spaces and to test how it can be presented and received in completely regular homes, outside of exclusive properties or pure white cube settings. So you could definitely say that sspatz's mission is to normalize living with art. The pandemic has clearly shown how important it is to open up new spaces and forms of presentation for art. We therefore decided to work with 12 artists during the lock-down to develop a Toolbox that people can use to create and encounter art in their own homes. In 2021 we sent out 55 boxes to people all over the world so they could create their very own contemporary art experience at home.

The special thing about the contributions gathered in the Toolboxes is that the works are only completed through the active participation of the recipients. How the activation is to be carried out in detail can be found either on the contribution itself or in an accompanying manual. Sometimes the instructions are relatively clear and sometimes absolutely ambiguous. In any case, however, the works call for dialogue and examination. For the contributions gathered in this Toolbox, the action of the recipients is decisive. They must be activated and should be touched - sometimes even roughly. The artworks in this box are strange tools. Not only do they intervene in the actual nature of the world and homes, but they also question our understanding of authorship and art. They are an invitation to question our own notions of where, when and what art is or can be.

The presentation of sspatz’s Toolbox project at Compound Yellow is an exhibition that extends from the Gallery to adjacent living spaces, a documentation of previous Toolbox activities and an open ended process for the audience in Chicago. With contributions by Franziska Windolf, Eva Gentner, Esther Steinbrecher, John Dombroski & Trevor Amery, Julia Dorflinger, Simon Fischer, Anas, Lukas Picard, Simon Pfeffel, Markus Vater, Aida El-Oweidy.