In Qu’est ce que c’est la maturité, the artist Manuel Graf examines different modes of action and angles of perspective across seemingly unrelated object arrangements. Fluctuating between archaeological architectural models, surreal mobiles as well as hyperactive toys, these are unified into a sober presentation that is reminiscent of a movie set.
In this neutralizing setting our cultural development is portrayed across different scales – from the personal maturation of the individual to the global-cultural formation of man – and accentuated in their intertwining self-similarities.

The work is a retrospect of Penetrating Surfaces, an extensive screening curated by Robert Seidel (http://www.robertseidel.com) for the Film Museum Vienna in 2014.  It deliberates on the materially-inherent aesthetic potential of the digital, a search above and beyond the boundaries of software and its media metaphors.

Manuel Graf, born in 1978, lives and works in Düsseldorf (Germany)