For the seventh time, the MMK is presenting works by the current graduates of Frankfurt’s art academy, the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule. In their final projects, the artists explore various media; this year the focus is on painting, film and installation.

The title of the graduates’ exhibition – “Parked Like Serious Oysters” – is based on the Manifeste Cannibale Dada by the French painter Francis Picabia (1897–1953). Throughout his career, Picabia consistently defied categorization in a certain artistic style. He began as an Impressionist, then turned to Cubism, processed elements of Fauvism as well as Surrealism in his works, and ultimately joined the Neo-Impressionists. He loved to play with ambiguities, and he opposed rigid conventions all his life. In his Manifeste Cannibale Dada, he called for protest against the middle-class world and its values, and against the inflexibility of the existing system. For the title of their show, the Städelschule graduates deliberately chose a quotation that can be understood as a resolution never to allow oneself to be pigeonholed, and always to encounter the new and unknown with a firm stance.

This year’s show will present works by thirty-two graduates from the classes of Monika Baer, Peter Fischli, Douglas Gordon, Judith Hopf, Michael Krebber, Tobias Rehberger, Willem de Rooij and Amy Sillman.

With: Salomo Andren, Maximilian Arnold, Patrick Alan Banfield, Christin Berg, Benedikte Bjerre, Calori & Maillard, Graziano Capitta, Victoria Colmegna, Inga Danysz, Jan Domicz, Ian Edmonds, Richard Eß, Charlie Froud, Larissa Hägele, Henrik Olai Kaarstein, Felix Kultau, Zac Langdon-Pole, Erika Landström, Hannah Levy, Julien Nguyen, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Anna Lucia Nissen, Jonathan Penca, Filippa Pettersson, Esper Postma, George Rippon, Veronika Russell, Marcello Spada, Anna-Lisa Theisen, Luke Willis Thompson, Ana Vogelfang, Anna Zacharoff