BAIT AND TACKLE
22.11.2025 –– 20.02.2026

Galería Fermay is pleased to present “Bait and Tackle”, a solo exhibition by Frankfurt an Main-based American artist Mike Bouchet (1970, Castro Valley, California). 

Mike Bouchet’s artistic career spans for over three decades starting in the mid-nineties when the artist graduated from UCLA in Los Angeles. After living in New York for a few years, by 2004 he had already established himself in the city of Frankfurt where he currently lives and works. 

Mike Bouchet’s body of work is the result of a research-based artistic practice that primarily focuses on the intricate and ever evolving relation between society —epitomised in the individual self— and the wider socioeconomic structures. Without being openly political, his work tackles issues of labour, exploitation, commerce and overconsumption, but he does so not by directly pointing at them, but rather, he develops conceptual strategies that poignantly signal the inner functioning of materialist capitalism while also borrowing elements from the fields of visual culture, advertisement and the food industry, amongst others. More specifically, Bouchet’s work delves in to, or better, recurrently short-circuits the notion of the American Way, understood here not only as the particular consumerist society emerged after Second World War in the US but also, and more importantly, the subsequent widespread assimilation of the core economic, moral and emotional thesis of American capitalism. 

By decontextualising and misappropriating iconic imagery, Mike Bouchet takes to his advantage our common understanding of things in order to create artworks that highlight the psychological load we all inadvertently carry on as well as the affective nature of a biased system that perpetuates desire in a never-ending quest of individual fulfillment. To do so, the artist turns to easily recognizable quotidian products such as cola, hamburgers or Hollywood films elevating them to the status of the sign, as understood by French sociologist Roland Barthes. It is here where the artist operates bringing forth the social, cultural and subjective connotations of such psycho-constructs to hijack our emotional and cognitive automatic responses. Very succinctly, the strategy consists on isolating and intervening the sign thereof suspending meaning. Such gestures usually result in viewers feeling a sense of estrangement and displacement —the uncanny kicks in when the resulting image, or experience, does not correspond with the internalized mental idea resulting very often in a certain degree of discomfort. Mike Bouchet’s conceptual stand also relies on a unapologetic use of irony as well as the absurd and the grotesque that only helps but increasing the intensity of the aforementioned reactions. 

On a formal level we see an heterogeneous approach to art making and a concatenation of wildly diverse projects that take the form of performance, installation, sculpture, painting or video, among other mediums. As noted, each respective realised project responds to a conceptual impulse and a specific context for which the artist finds a suitable formal solution that allows to pursue his own goals. One early example of the above is the series Jacuzzis (1998) where the artist produced with cheap materials fully functioning jacuzzis with unorthodox shapes that made them redundant and impossible to be used. In My Cola Lite (2000) the artist embarked in a project to produce the blackest cola in the market that emulates the viscosity and colour of oil. In Carpe Denim (2004) the artist manufactured thousands of jeans of his own design in a factory Colombia to be later thrown away from an airplane in that same area, an action that ambiguously might recall the act of distributing aid to populations in need or that of bombing. Tender was a project where the artist, in collaboration with a professional perfume company, recreated the smell of the dollar with the intention of triggering all those psychological reactions related to the aura of money.

“Bait and Tackle” presents a new series of paintings titled Pallette Paintings that take as starting point the artist’s own paint palletes that he has been painstakingly photographing for the last eighteen years. Following suit from previous artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Sol Lewitt, and more specifically, from Martin Kippenberger’s infamous Dear Painter, Paint for Me (1981), all of whom questioned in their own ways the notion of authorship, Mike Bouchet’s Pallette Paintings also points to further relevant contemporary issues such as labour and outsourcing. This is not the first time that Mike Bouchet contracts the actual painting of his works to professional painters in China and Germany. This gesture is already present in previous series such as Burger Paintings and Tapestry Cartoons. Conceptually, the Pallette Paintings series indicate an interest in the residue and the privacy of the studio, what was just a remnant and unmediated leftover is suddenly placed at the center of the artist aesthetic and formal concerns. By shifting his attention to the discarded, the artist questions not only the range pre-established considerations around the language of art, and its overall appreciation, but also the system that’s sustains it. The result are beautiful abstract compositions where the color, rhythm, and light connects with the history of painting, the Baroque, and to some extent, recalls the brushstrokes of Old Masters such as Rubens. 

Scattered through the main space of the gallery there are the voluptuous Keglon Bottles (2016), oversized glass versions of the 2L Coke plastic bottles. Again, the artist makes use of an iconic motif to reflect on the ins and outs of those psychological traits that bond us to such ubiquitous and value- charged products. On top of that, the lids emulate the texture of nipples, adding on a extra layer of engagement that evoke the body and desire. In the showroom area there are three paintings from the series Colachromes that were made out of using the same substance the artist created in My Cola Lite project. These are indeed cola on cotton paintings that incorporate imagery usually related to the American Way but with a twist, as it happens in the Cowman Study 1 (2013), where the virile cowboy riding a horse is replaced by the image of a man riding a cow. Colachromes introduces yet another important feature in Bouchet’s oeuvre—although his body of work is made out of a great number of different projects, there is a clear conceptual line that connects them to the point that sometimes new projects begin with the leftovers of previous ones. Lastly, in the middle of the showroom space we find a Sylvas Lounger, a fully functional chair made out of the classic metallic shopping cart — the hilariousness of the object is somewhat confronted with its analytical design that somewhat reminds us to the aseptic examination chairs at a doctor’s office. The artists humour is ever present but distinctly double-edged, drawing viewers in with playfulness while simultaneously exposing the strangeness of a society defined less by what it produces than by what it consumes This last note kind of summarises Mike Bouchet intentions throughout his practice —that is, to test the boundaries between the individual agency and the overarching realm of capitalism that physically and intangibly pervades the reality we live in. 

Mike Bouchet’s works are represented in numerous international private and public collections, including LVMH Collection Paris, Belvedere Museum Vienna, CAPC/Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Bernard Arnault Collection Paris, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art Oslo, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Deutsche Bank Collection Frankfurt/M, DZ Bank Frankfurt/M, DekaBank Collection Frankfurt/M, Städelmuseum Frankfurt/M, Museum Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt/M, Margulies Collection Miami, Ullens Collection Beijing. Bouchet also has been participating artist in international biennials such as the Venice Biennial in 2009 and Manifesta in Zurich 2016. His works has been exhibited in various international Institutions and Museum exhibitions as MoMA PS1 (2005), Palais de Tokyo (2009), Schirn Kunsthalle (solo, 2010), Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo (2008, 2009, 2015), Jumex Collection Mexico (2012), Kunstverein Hannover (Made in Germany 2, 2012), Portikus Frankfurt/M (together with Paul McCarthy, 2014), National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway (2018), Middelheimmuseum Antwerp, Belgium (2018), AROS Museum in Aarhus, DK (2019), Kunsthal Charlottenborg Copenhagen, DK (2020). Mike Bouchet received the 1822 Art Prize by the Frankfurter Sparkasse Foundation in 2014. Since 2019 the artist holds Professorship position and is the chairperson the Department of Sculpture at the University of Art and Design in Offenbach.