Honest Deception: Tedi Holm
Schleswig-Holstein Haus Rostock, Germany.
2024

Exhibition view.
Honest Deception: Tedi Holm was created in 2024 for Schleswig-Holstein Haus Rostock, Germany, in collaboration with German writer and artist Steffen Dürre. The exhibition, playing on the museum genre of an "unjustly forgotten artist from the past," introduced a fictional DDR proto-conceptualist, Tedi Holm, who allegedly produced, in the late 1950s to early 1960s, pseudo-cubist works under the name of the fictional 1920s artist Maxi Maler.
The key idea this work develops is ‘doubling a heteronym’: the pieces presented was not just made under the name of a fictional artistic personality, but under the name of an imaginary personage allegedly invented by another fictional artist. Making it even more confusing, the gender of both characters was intentionally unspecified, constantly fluctuating in the exhibition statement ‘wall text’ between ‘she’ and ‘he’.
The graphic works and assemblages for the show produced by Ilya Orlov. The “artists’ diaries” and other exhibition texts written by Steffen Dürre, with the participation of Ilya Orlov. Poster and wall labels designed by Steffen Dürre.

Charcoal on paper.
English translation:
HONEST DECEPTION: TEDI HOLM
A Rediscovery of Forgotten Rostock Conceptual Artist
This exhibition is the first public presentation of works of Tedi Holm, an unjustly forgotten conceptual artist who worked in Rostock in the late 1950s – early 1960s.
As a result of the curatorial team’s extensive archival research, the show re-creates Holm’s main art project, which took the form of a long-lasting conceptualist enterprise: the creation of a fictional personality of German avant-gardist Maxi Maler. Under this heteronym, in the late 1950s-early 1960s Holm produced an extensive series of works that most bizarrely combined the influences of Paris Cubist school, Rostock’s architectural Hansa gothic motifs, subtle jokes on German cuisine, and ‘psychedelic eroticism’ reminiscent of Duchamp, Picabia, and Hans Bellmer.
In many respects, Tedi Holm was a forerunner of Conceptual art and Conceptualism, despite he never identified herself in those terms. Her ‘proto-conceptualism’, however, is not so much a parallel to the classic American and British ‘analytic’ Conceptual art which agenda was the exploration of the philosophical concept of art. For Holm, the object of critical enquiry is rather the concept of artist, than the concept of art. In this, his works much anticipated the strategies of East European and Soviet underground conceptualism, such us, for example, Ilya Kabakov’s 1970s-1980s interplays with fictional characters, and Mladan Stilinović’s games of life with language.
Indeed, the critical revision of the Modernist concept of artist, artistic identity, creative personality, and artistic biography is at the centre of Tedi Holm’s artistic inquiry. Moreover, Holm pushed this further than even Kabakov and his Eastern-bloc peers: in her work, it is not only artistic or cultural identity, but the very core of the artist’s human personality – the level of gender and sexuality – also becomes fluid, flexible, interchangeable, and, finally, ungraspable.
In addition to Holm’s ‘fictional Cubist’ project made in the early 1960s under the heteronym of Maxi Maler, the present exhibition for the first time introduces Holm’s only known late work she made under her real name, a poetic and enigmatic installation Baltic Sky.
The exhibition is supplemented with excerpts from Tedi Holm’s recently discovered diary.
“Art’s relationship with truth is ambivalent. On the one hand, art is not foreign to truth, that is characterised by a cathartic ‘recognition effect’ of art. On the other hand, the nature of art is inseparably linked to fiction, inherent untruth, which is art’s fundamental principle. In a sense, art is a kind of ‘honest deception’, and this paradox constitutes the very foundation of art.
It is the clash between these two principles — truth and untruth – the friction that arises between them – is what engenders the impact of a work of art. If such friction is finely ‘calibrated’, the work, akin to a well-functioning lighter, ignites a spark and a bright flame ensues. This spark is wit, the flame is sense.”
- Tedi Holm, Diaries,1957.
Please click here for other entries from Tedi Holm's Diaries, written by Steffen Dürre (in German).
Video tour to the exhibition
Acknowledgements:
Anna Rawlings, Antje Blaudow and Ian Binda, Art & Language, Christoph Chciuk, Christoph Knitter, Claudia Aßmann, Finn Cowan, Francis Picabia, Hans Bellmer, Hartmut Domröse, Ilya Kabakov, Jana Müller, Juan Gris, Lennart Langanki, Marcel Duchamp, Matthew Cowan, Olga Rozanova, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Thomas Häntzschel, Tim Aßmann, Tobi Brüggemann, Vladimir Nabokov.
Photographs by Thomas Häntzschel and Steffen Dürre.
The exhibition was supported by Kunstverein zu Rostock.
