Thomas Mailaender

Three years before a green Versace dress led to the creation of Google’s specialty search engine that indexes billions of the world’s images, French artist Thomas Mailaender was kicking around the internet compiling his own collection of found source material. The earliest recorded attempts of his love affair with photo-montage were made in 1998, when he sat down at his computer and began fucking with other people’s photographs.

For his first solo exhibition in New York, Thomas Mailaender revisits these original photo manipulations.

Dusting off old hard drives and pulling out the scrappy digital compositions from his late 90’s archive, Mailaender began transferring the works to 4x5 negative film. he then retreated to his makeshift, homemade darkroom and continued experimenting by reconstructing the images even further by hand.

The resulting installation at Moiety = 1998.

Thomas Mailaender (b.1979) is a French multimedia artist living and working between Paris and Marseille. His work has been exhibited internationally. most recently at the Centre Pompidou in france, the festival images in Switzerland and Roman Road Gallery in London.

In addition to his solo exhibition at Moiety, Thomas Mailaender has been asked by Printed Matter to create a limited editioned work for the New York Art Book Fair. Mailaender will be at PS1 doing a book signing of his new book, 100 Tiles, on Thursday, September 17.