Using his friends’ ribbing as a catalyst, the French multimedia artist’s exhibition at London’s Roman Road gallery, and contribution to a group show at The Tate Modern, sees him imagine a correspondence with his homebound, pregnant wife as he travels the world.
The work consists of a series of sham, photoshopped images of himself; a photomontage of holiday snaps collected from hours of trawling the internet.
His face, superimposed onto gap year student mash-ups, are accompanied with formal letters to his wife back home.
“My love, Another mountain-top on the counter!” he writes in one, alongside an image of him at the pinnacle of a snowy mountain. “You should have seen me lost in the clouds! What bliss! And feeling like the tallest man in the world! I love you both, Thomas”.
Mailaender is usually absent from his iconoclastic projects, making Gone Fishing feel a little less anarchic than his previous work, more personal in tone.
We meet at the Tate Modern as he put the finishing touches to his exhibit. Mailaender insists this series doesn’t mark a shift towards him being more present in his work – it’s just easier, he points out, for the artist to sometimes be the subject.
“It comes at the beginning from my own story,” he says. “But it’s more universal, something happened and I had to expand on that.
Mailaender also sees the series as “a way to mock basic things that could happen to you.
“Instead of taking life very seriously, I prefer to crush it,” he says.
