Toys Redux - On Play and Critique

The group exhibition brings together artists who make creative use of formats and imagery from popular culture usually addressed to children or teenagers. Such adoptions and manipulations of motifs from video games, television shows, movies, and cartoons should not be seen as mere pop-cultural quotations: they simultaneously comment on the capitalist production of these consumer worlds. Their pop aesthetic and the promise of an "innocent" and playful universe of childlike fantasy contrast with the underlying reality of neoliberal advertising and marketing strategies. The thematic exhibition unfolds a dialogue between works by artists from several generations, including selected pieces from the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst's own collections, and expands on one of the museum's ongoing central themes previously explored in shows by Cory Arcangel (2005), Marvin Gaye Chetwynd (2007), and Alex Bag (2011) as well as Deterioration, They Said (2009).