Ordet is pleased to present Die Vier von der Tankstelle (The Four from the Filling Station, 2023) an installation by Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys.

There are bad jokes. And then, as the artists have pointed out, “there are things that are so bad they become a joke.” This is the treacherous territory de Gruyter and Thys explore and draw on to create work that manages to be at once unpalatable and absorbing. The artists have collaborated as a duo since the late 1980s, when they met as students in Brussels. Their practice employs a wide range of media, including video, painting, sculpture, and photography. In particular, the mannequins and puppets created throughout their career, while wildly different in subject and treatment, are all characterized by an arresting appearance and a rotten core.

The installation is titled after a 1930 German film operetta. Any impression of breezy entertainment, however, is dispelled by the intermittent tune coming from a black sedan parked inside Ordet: parts of Beethoven’s Seventh and Ninth Symphonies recorded by Wilhelm Furtwängler echo eerily in the space, as the car’s lights switch on. The Mercedes Benz and its occupants, four uniformed mannequins of hybridized German Shepherds, are not of the fairytale variety. Their dubious provenance is as unsettling as their current manifestation. Haunting, motionless but ravenous, they look on the hunt but also on the run. Their motives may not be spelled out, but no disclaimer or warning is needed to recognize they’re not done.

The installation was originally commissioned by Steirischer Herbst: Humans and Demons, Graz, Austria.