Playing with Ludwig

In Playing with Ludwig. Figures of Thinking, artist Nikolaus Gansterer and philosopher Klaus Speidel address fundamental questions of sense-making in language and visual forms. In a playful dialogue with the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, they tackle subjects like pain and pictures, colour and imagination, death and the materiality of language. Combining drawings, dialogues and installations, they devise a book that shows the traces of its own making.

The book Playing with Ludwig, Figures of Thinking, co-published with Les Tanneries - Centre d'art contemporain, is neither an exhibition catalog nor entirely an artist's book. Deliberately conceived as a hybrid editorial object, it prolongs reflexions that first became public with the exhibition Figures de pensée by Nikolaus Gansterer and Klaus Speidel in the Galerie Haute des Tanneries, from September 25, 2021 to February 13, 2022. As a play of philosophical and plastic dialogue by the artist-philosopher and the philosopher-curator around the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and in particular his Philosophical Investigations, the exhibition and the book are the result of a joint invitation from Éric Degoutte, director and head of programming, to the duo that was to form. Pursuing their interrogations on the forms of thinking in the book, the duo reformed as a trio with the graphic designer Grégroire Romanet, invited in as a third author to thus stage a three-way dialogue. Beyond the images alone, the book contains transcripts of many conversations in the years leading up to the publication of the book and a central booklet with the excerpts of The Philosophical Investigations that served as the basis for the artworks and dialogues, annotated with reflections and drawings.

Texts by Nikolaus Gansterer, Klaus Speidel, Éric Degoutte, Roger Malbert