The market economy was introduced into former communist countries after 1989 as if it was an invasion.In reality, there was a mixture of gold-digger mentality and semi-legal business diligence; shadow economy and the black market acted as spheres of activity for strategies of daily survival. Kandl shows people waiting, haggling, and hurrying along. The report-like and explosive (from the point of view of contemporary history) paintings derive from photos which were made in many of the Eastern European countries.

The pictures acquired by the evn collection are based on motives from Moscow. Slogans like “nothing succeeds like success” or “good deals” burst into the genre pictures of peripheral, spontaneous economy. These sentence fragments come from the neo-liberal jargon of management guides and stock market reports. The garish colours increase the dissonance; the people and language bubbles belong to different social worlds. According to Kandl, it is all too easy to forget that in order to survive in the “poor” shadow economy, one requires no less intelligence than a few rungs higher up the social ladder.

Wolfgang Kos, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)