Emerging contemporary artists - selected so you don't have to...

Thomas Mailaender

Practice: multimedia, multidisciplinary

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Buffoonery with a serious edge: many artists employ similar approaches to their practice, but Mailaender's humour is bang up to date in its reflections of a world modulated by trashy online media and (more peripherally) issues such as growing divisions between rich and poor.

A series of 'starving artist' sponsorships feature Mailaender's head Photoshopped onto downloaded images of corporate cheque presentations, while in 2008 he donated 3,000 toilet rolls to a Marseilles charity.

'Chicken Museum', a 2010 pseudo-experiment, housed hens in a coop papered with Internet dross.

The fact that one later died may illustrate the unexpected sensibility of chickens, and/or cast serious doubts on the safety of exposure to the worst of online imagery. Or perhaps prove nothing except Mailaender's irrepressible absurdity.