Oliver Gather deals with human interaction. “I’ll buy your car!”: This is what it says on business cards that second-hand car dealers stick behind the windshield wipers. For his Car Spam Story (2012), he collected these mass products, modified them and, irritatingly, designed them as watercolors and unique pieces. Similar cards by Gather will find their way back onto windshields in Neu-Ulm. The Car Spam Card Collection consists of almost 1000 different cards left behind by car dealers in the city. Collected from the street, they are presented like an urban butterfly collection in specially made sorting boxes.

“(…) These by-products of the service society are lovingly picked up and put together in elegant wooden boxes. In other words, Gather recycles the recycled offerings of second-hand dealers and enhances them – simply by paying attention to them. In his cabinet of curiosities of the trivial, he then develops a taxonomy of the cards, which are classified according to supplier, color, image motif or rhetorical formula. This meticulous and concentrated activity (…), coupled with the systematic process of classification, suddenly charges the unpopular advertisement with a new value and places it on the pedestal of the noble and valuable.(…) Of course, this is also about the question of the status of the exhibited or collected object and the legitimacy of some art values. But it seems to be more an interest in sociological phenomena that leads the artist to this absurd activity. These cards not only refer to the used car business; they are the concrete traces of the distributor who walks through the city and is forced to appropriate the streets. Like Hansel and Gretel, he leaves traces of colorful plastic; he unconsciously marks his path and makes his route visible – Gather follows and records his foray. I know that Gather is interested in these kinds of tiny, insignificant traces of our civilization, and that he pays particular attention to such social micro-interactions and integrates them into his work; I know that Gather understands these otherwise unnoticed traces as indicators of our relationship to space. In this respect, this small exhibition is an artist’s original contribution to microsociology.” (Emmanuel Mir)