Rice University Art Gallery has commissioned German artist Thorsten Brinkmann to create a new site-specific installation, The Great Cape Rinderhorn, for his first museum solo-exhibition in the United States. Working primarily from objects found in Houston, Brinkmann will turn Rice Gallery into a place where the familiar is made strange as castaway goods are reimagined through Brinkmann’s idiosyncratic sensibility that combines assemblage sculptures with his self-portrait and still life photography.

A self-proclaimed serialsammler (“serial collector”), Thorsten Brinkmann keeps whatever catches his eye as he sifts through the stuff we have hopelessly accumulated from the broken and discarded to functional goods sitting in purgatory on thrift store shelves. In his Portraits of a Serialsammler series, Brinkmann turns his finds into creative costumes of fabric-scrap vests, cloaks made from pleated skirts, and trash can helmets and photographs himself wearing these ensembles, yet never shows his face. The images marry the traditional and absurd as he strikes the poses of regal knights or monarchs, drawing from centuries of Western’s paintings conventions of portraiture. In another series, studiobluten (“studio blossoms”), Brinkmann arranges objects he has collected into elegant still lifes that mine painting traditions like Dutch Vanitas. Coat hangers, chipped vases, dented pots and pans, and miscellaneous bric-a-brac are given a fresh life through Brinkmann’s playful recombination and reframing.   

Following the opening reception, the exhibit will be on display through May 15.