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Like many, if not most painters of his generation, Michael Raedecker is a scavenger of images as indebted to modern cinema, advertising and print-media as he is to the rich history of European painting to which he, a Dutchman, is an obvious heir. This heritage, however, has grown in importance over the years as he engages with an expanding list of traditional genres: landscape, interior, still life, vanitas painting, even modernist abstraction.

The point of departure for any given work is usually a detail from a catalogue, film-still or magazine, which he then refines in the form of a sketch, and this becomes the blueprint from which a painting is patiently elaborated. The frequently ephemeral nature of the source material contrasts with the invariably time-consuming nature of the picture-making process, a unique combination of painting and embroidery in which pictorial illusionism is constantly undermined by the insistent physicality and contrapuntal play of roughly sluiced paint and painstakingly threaded yarn. Recreating this found imagery in the medium of embroidery and painting, Michael Raedecker deliberately avoids any hint as to the epoch and content of his motifs. Thus he imparts to his works an aura of surreal timelessness. Doing so his paintings become archetypes, pregnant with allusions to the surface on which the history of the genres is projected.

With a conversation between Alison M. Gingeras and Michael Raedecker and an essay by CaoimhÌn Mac Giolla Lèith