The unsuspecting reader picks up an art magazine only to find untitled inserts with photographs of gallery spaces. Below these, titles indicate not only city and gallery names but also references to specific-issues of magazines like Kunstforum or Flash Art. One thing strikes the reader: none of the rooms depicted has art on the walls. Picking up a copy of such a magazine at the Museum Fodor, the visitor looks up from pages of empty spaces, complete with names and references to their previous place of publication, only to find the series of architectonical maquettes by Maria Verstappen and Erwin Driessens which were used to make those pages. Intended to be shot from a single position, these tabletop sections of rooms are exquisitely detailed, down to impossible miniature plugpoints or particular types of skylight or overhead piping. The expert craftmanship involved seems all the more perverse when it becomes clear that the maquette serves only to mediate between two stages of the image’s life: from photograph to model to photograph, from context to decontextualization to recontextualization. Or perhaps the gradual movement from truth to untruth: from reality to magazine, from magazine to reality and from reality to magazine again, hinting in Mallarmean manner that reality exists only to end up in magazines.

The models themselves vary greatly because the problems to be solved are so various. while Art Studio, Milan, resembles a toy theatre or some Baroque architectural fantasy, roofless Blum Helman, New York, has the air of a Greek ruin, with two topless pillars marooned on a polished floor and a skylight casting long shadows. Looking from above makes one conscious of the elements of the rooms in a different way. Spaces become recognisable by their floors, for instance: the zigzag parquet of the Kunsthalle, Basel, or the rectilinear planking of Johnen und Schottle, Cologne, the patterned stone flooring of the Lisson Gallery, London, or the mottled grey of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Like quotations which crop up in conservation, they exist in order to be turned to other uses. The difficult V-shaped model of a section of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, makes viewers even more than usually aware of a design where vision is blocked with systematic cruelty, while the elongated doorway and complex corner at Galerie Nachst St. Stefan, Vienna, can never be seen like this in reality. In fact, these models strain towards achieving a reality of their own. (Each one has its own lighting system.) They alter the perception of real spaces, even of spaces the viewer has never visited. Exhibition, the collective title, suggests an approach which is critical of the power of the press, hinting also that the artwork is powerless against its container. For artists, 'exposure' has less to do with exhibiting than with being corralled by a house style and a constant homage to the gallery itself, which occupies a position somewhere between an ancient monument and a great Parisian fashion house. The maquettes represent only half of the exhibition, however. The other half consists of the magazines, with their strange, anonymous pages quoted from elsewhere. Recognisable conceptual in approach, Driessens & Verstappen's work recalls Anne & Patrick Poirier's reconstructions from classical texts or Gunter Forg’s superimposition of space, times and points of view. Its difference lies in the questions it broaches - about perception, memory and ontological puzzlement - and the end to which it is directed: an interrogation of that very art system on which it depends.