Gretchen Bender — Political Entertainment, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 2025

Original exhibition poster. Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 2025. 44 × 59 cm. Offset-printed on paper. Folded as issued.

Condition: very good; folded as issued, with light handling wear and minor surface softness. Clean overall, with strong image and text.

Poster for Gretchen Bender’s solo exhibition Political Entertainment, held at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 14 November 2025 – 4 April 2026. The exhibition presented Bender’s Top Ten Grossing Films of 1988, shown for the first time since its 1989 debut: ten black, crumpled heat-set vinyl works, backlit with neon and carrying the titles of that year’s highest-grossing films.

Bender’s work sits at the sharp edge of 1980s image culture. Close to the Pictures Generation, but moving more aggressively into television, video, corporate graphics and mass entertainment, she treated media not as background noise but as the structure through which politics was delivered. Her “electronic theater” installations mixed video, sound and performance to confront the power of corporate imagery over collective consciousness.

This poster carries that logic back into print. Hollywood titles become surface, list, commodity and cultural index: Big, Die Hard, Coming to America, Beetlejuice, Good Morning Vietnam. The entertainment industry appears here not through actors or images, but through names already processed by box office ranking, public memory and commercial repetition.

A current exhibition poster, but already functioning as a secondary support for a work about circulation. Film title into sculpture. Sculpture into exhibition. Exhibition into poster. A sheet of paper recording the return of a 1989 media work into a 2025 gallery context.