Käthe-Kollwitz-Prize 2024 to CANDIDA HÖFER
With this prize, the Akademie der Künste honors one of the most well known German photographers. Candida Höfer's oeuvre, which has grown over five decades, ranks among the photographic avant-garde of the present day. Her large format photographs show public and semi-public spaces such as iconic historical libraries, museums and opera houses. "Candida Höfer imbues these spaces with a profound, almost spiritual quality through her precise framing and details, further emphasized by the absence of people," says Karin Sander, who is part of the jury together with Hito Steyerl and Siegfried Zielinski.
The prize will be awarded on 13th September 2024 as part of Berlin Art Week at the Akademie der Künste. On the occasion of the award ceremony, the Akademie der Künste will be showing an exhibition of Candida Höfer's works..
Porträt Candida Höfer: photo @ Ralph Müller
GUY BEN-NER
We’ve Lost
at Kunstmuseum Luzern
curated by Fanni Fetzer
Guy Ben Ner (*1969) makes a lot out of very little, albeit while radically integrating both himself and his private surroundings into his work: his family’s apartment in Tel Aviv serves him as a location for a low-budget action film with his wife and children as the main protagonists. The exaggerated Hollywood-style sound and image effects make a strange impact. What do we see when sound and image influence our feelings so strongly?
Guy Ben Ner films with his family in the branches of a furniture store or else has the employees of a fast-food chain call out names that supposedly refer to orders, but when strung together actually express a political message. Guy Ben Ner’s works are characterised by the difference between the improvised settings and the stringency of the artistic concepts. The artist addresses the theme of the influence of the economy and politics on the most intimate of human relations. Oscillating between private and public space, between family and society, Guy Ben Ner’s works adopt a clear political stance.
Guy Ben-Ner, Treehouse Kit, 2005, video still, Courtesy of the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Tony Cragg
Rare Earth
at Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea in Lisbon, Portugal
October 26, 2023 - February 25, 2024
Rare Earth exhibition, by Tony Cragg, brings, for the first time, to Lisbon, a significant set of around 5 dozen works by the artist, including sculpture and drawing, from 1979 to 2023, in a revealing perspective of his work. In addition to the sculptures and drawings on display at the National Museum of Contemporary Art from October 26, 2023 to February 25, 2024, the dialogue with the works also extends to the public space, in an unprecedented partnership between MNAC and Lisbon City Council.
Tony Cragg, Labyrinth, 2016
BOOK RELEASE
Alice Channer
Heavy Metals/ Silk Cut
published by DISTANZ
Heavy Metals / Silk Cut is the artist’s first comprehensive monographic exhibition catalogue, published on the occasion of her solo exhibition in the two buildings of Kunstmuseum and Kunsthalle Appenzell, which features new productions as well as works from the past twelve years. With essays by Rosanna McLaughlin and Zoë Gray, an experimental text by Daisy Hildyard, and a conversation with the artist by Stefanie Gschwend, the book project invites readers to discover her process-based creative approach.
Hg. Kunsthalle / Kunstmuseum Appenzell | German/English | Softcover with American dust jacket, 23 × 28 cm | 288 pages, 150 color images | ISBN 978-3-95476-605-5
Thomas Schütte
Westkunstmodelle 1:1
at De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands
September 16, 2023 - January 28, 2024
Konrad Fischer Galerie is delighted to announce Westkunstmodelle 1:1, a solo exhibition by Thomas Schütte at De Pont Museum, Tilburg.
More than forty years after he first envisioned them, Thomas Schütte will now see three of his architectural models from the legendary Westkunst exhibition (1981) take shape at full scale.
Thomas Schütte, Schiff (Modell 1:20), 1980, foto: Candida Höfer, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023
Book Presentation & Artist Talk
Peter Buggehout
Erotism
published by DISTANZ and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Artist talk with Peter Buggenhout and Ory Dessau
September 13, 6 - 7.30 PM
The book is published on the occasion of Peter Buggenhout's solo exhibition The Ever Changing Repetition at Konrad Fischer Galerie in 2022. Please join us at the DISTANZ office to celebrate the launch, followed by a conversation between Ory Dessau and the artist.
The Belgian sculptor Peter Buggenhout describes his hybrid creations as “abject things” that refuse to be categorized as anything, even as works of art. To make them, he uses materials that have rarely found their way into contemporary art: house dust meets garbage, tanned cow stomachs and remnants of bouncy castles appear together with acrylic glass and cast polyamide. Even when more traditional materials like Carrara marble turn up in his works, the objects he affixes to the stone surfaces seem oddly assembled and compressed and defy any figurative interpretation. Both with their peculiar choice of materials and with their enormous physical presence and archaic hermeticism, Buggenhout’s objects occupy a singular position in the field of contemporary sculpture.
The richly illustrated monograph with essays by the curator Selen Ansen, the art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, and the artist provides an overview of the works and series the internationally renowned sculptor has created since 2017.
Location: Hallesches Ufer 78, 10963 Berlin
Please RSVP to info(at)distanz.de
Hg. Konrad Fischer Galerie | English | Hardcover with linen, 22,5 x 29,5 cm | 320 pages, 340 color illustrations | ISBN 978-3-95476-542-3
Lawrence Weiner
UNDER THE SUN
at Amorepacific Museum of Art
Seoul, South Korea
August 31, 2023 – January 28, 2024The Amorepacific Museum of Art presents LAWRENCE WEINER: UNDER THE SUN, a solo museum survey of the remarkable American artist Lawrence Weiner. Weiner was born in New York City in 1942, where he lived and worked throughout his life until his passing in 2021. He is considered a founding figure of the Conceptual art movement, which emerged in the 1960s amid the postwar art movements in Europe and the United States. Weiner considered his work sculpture with variable dimensions. He tacitly outlined the material potentialities of language—his primary material—describing his work as, ‘language + the materials referred to’. The breadth of his artistic practice is evidenced by his numerous artist’s books, edition works, music, films and videos. This exhibition is both Weiner’s inaugural solo presentation in South Korea as well as the artist’s first comprehensive show within an institutional context since his death.
The exhibition introduces a wide array of Weiner’s works. Besides installations on the walls and floors of the museum, it includes editions, drawings, posters, cartoons and videos that collectively illustrate his extensive artistic practice. The language of Lawrence Weiner is not confined to any specific context nor to a prescribed meaning or presentation. It remains open to personal and collective interpretations that operate within and sensitively respond to the specificities of the culture in which his works are located at any given time. Under the themes of “Subject-Object’, ‘Process’ and ‘Simultaneous Realities’, this exhibition attempts to create a space for new visual dialogues that transcend historical time and cultural space by bringing together Weiner’s art with select pieces from our Korean art collection. Weiner’s language functions both as the point of entry and departure to engage with these works. Befittingly with this context, 7 works have been translated into Korean and have been collectively installed with their English original language.
Amorepacific Museum of Art sincerely hopes that his words, when presented in this context, provide an occasion where our attitudes towards history, culture and the world can be challenged and expanded.
Now Representing: David Douard
Konrad Fischer Galerie is delighted to announce the representation of David Douard.
David Douard is known for his sculptural assemblages and mixed-media installations that explore a broad range of references such as language, poetry, science, and mainstream culture.
Themes of identity and technology frequently appear in his installations. The nature of his enigmatic and thought-provoking work reflects on how the digital age influences our perception of self and others.
David Douard was born 1983 in Perpignan, France. He lives and works in Aubervilliers, France.
His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including institutions such as UCCA Dune, Beidaihe (2023); Serralves Museum, Porto (2022); FRAC Île-de-France, Paris (2020); IMMA–Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (2017); Kunstverein Braunschweig (2016); Fridericianum, Kassel (2015); Sculpture Center, New York (2014); and Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2014). David Douard participated in Gwangju Biennale (2018), Taipei Biennial (2014), and Biennale de Lyon (2013).
The artist will present a comprehensive solo exhibition at Konrad Fischer Galerie Berlin from September 15 through November 4, 2023. Titled ACHéTE LE NACRé à LEURS âMES the exhibition will open on September 15 during Berlin Art Week 2023
David Douard, UN’FOLD, 2023 I courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Gregor Schneider
Ernst Franz Vogelmann-Prize for Sculpture 2023
at Kunsthalle Vogelmann, Heilbronn, Germany
July 15 - October 29, 2023
Gregor Schneider has been awarded the Ernst Franz Vogelmann-Prize for Sculpture, given jointly by Städtische Museen Heilbronn (Municipal Museums Heilbronn) and the Ernst Franz Vogelmann Stiftung (Ernst Franz Vogelmann Foundation), both based in Heilbronn, Germany.The prize will also include a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Vogelmann in Summer 2023.
Marcel Broodthears
at Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland
until October 1, 2023
Assembled by guest curator Simone Gehr from works held at the Kunsthaus, the cabinet exhibition asks how exactly Broodthaers envisaged the ideal museum. What did he criticise about the museums of his time? And how, on the basis of his works, can we reflect on the museum landscape of today? His concerns are ones that are shared by the public: why are some works ‘worth’ more than others, and what role does the museum play in those monetary valuations? Is a work only ‘genuine’ if it is signed? And where do descriptions of works lead us astray?
At the heart of the exhibition are Broodthaers’s graphic editions: a group of 25 works from throughout his artistic career, all of which are held in the Collection of Prints and Drawings at the Kunsthaus. In the context of Broodthaers, the term ‘graphic editions’ is used quite broadly, covering not only prints but also film, photography and installations. The editions are complemented by a few related groups of works on loan, such as open letters and films by the artist.
courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
at Dia Beacon, New York
July 1, 2023 – January 2025
Since the mid-1980s, Rita McBride has developed a conceptual, cross-disciplinary, intermedia, and feminist approach to art making that holds collaboration at its center. This exhibition centers on the artist’s long-standing interest in architecture, design, and sculpture as they relate to the public sphere in forms such as seating structures, movement-guiding systems, and commercial awnings. McBride’s monumental Arena(1997)—a modular structure that is activated by the presence of audiences and performers alike—is at the core of the presentation. Alongside Arena are freestanding and wall-mounted artworks from the last two decades that reflect McBride’s longstanding interest in how public infrastructures shape ways of looking.
Arena becomes an arena when animated by people in an ongoing and open process that is punctuated by choreographed engagements. For the duration of the presentation at Dia Beacon, an expanding body of artists, performers, writers, musicians, and dancers will activate physical and virtual spaces as part of a series of engagements with Arena. The series, collectively called Momentum, is initiated by McBride with experimental performance collective discoteca flaming star (founded by Cristina Gomez Barrio and Wolfgang Mayer) and choreographer Alexandra Waierstall.
courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie I photo: Anne Poehlmann
Thomas Schütte. Ich bin nicht allein
A movie by Corinna Belz
Cinema release
June 29, 2023
Movie premiere
Düsseldorf, June 25, 4pm
Berlin, June 27, 8.15pm
Setting: a workshop. When it comes to Thomas Schütte's larger than life sculptures, the work is hands on – and on an impressive scale. Sanding, sawing and milling are the order of the day. The artist, with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, moulds the eyes of a figure with his own hands or sometimes uses computer simulation. Regardless of the machinery, technology or material, it becomes clear: art is hard work.
Alice Channer
Heavy Metals / Silk Cut
at Kunstmuseum Appenzell, Switzerland
July 2 - October 8, 2023
The exhibition Heavy Metals / Silk Cut spans across the two buildings of the Kunstmuseum and the Kunsthalle Appenzell. It features new works, including an architectural intervention, complemented by an overview of sculptures, drawings and installations from the last decade.
In her explorations of materials and processes, Alice Channer casts and bends metals or folds fabrics, draws with cigarette ash and manifests the hidden dimensions of the world of matter. She offers a perspective on what lies beyond the categories and assumptions that shape our perception of objects and our relationship to them. Channer’s works consist of geological and natural materials or representations of natural elements, such as shells, fingers or stones. The artist transforms these in profound, synthetic processes, often in professional manufacturing facilities that have nothing to do with the production of art, such as factories for paint coating or the chemical industry. She had, for example, the shells of spider crabs and brown crabs vacuum-metallised, allowing the authentic physicality of these objects to collide with the result of identical, rhythmic and mechanical working steps. Industrial methods of production, such as the precision engineering of CNC milling to shape aluminium into the desired form or couture techniques to fold images of geological layers in heavy crêpe de chine, are constitutive of form. Channer relentlessly juxtaposes the organic and the artificial, the biological and the industrial, weaving the traces of production processes into the language of her sculptures. She not only confronts her artistic signature with the cold aesthetics of mechanical shaping, but also points to the fragility of the ecology with these seductive yet fragile exoskeletons.
Alice Channer, Mechanoreceptor, Icicles, 2018 | courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Wolfgang Laib
The Beginning of Something Else
at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart
June 17 - November 5, 2023
Wolfgang Laib creates his subtle works in an exchange with the natural environment and in tune with the seasons. Whether it be gathering pollen for his famous minimalistic, luminous yellow floor works or the lengthy production of his sculptures made of beeswax—respect for nature is the artist’s driving force. Since the late 1970s, Laib’s thinking and art have posed questions about our being and actions as part of fragile living habitats and in this respect could not be more topical.
In this exhibition developed in collaboration with Wolfgang Laib, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart is presenting pieces from the most important work complexes in each of the artist’s creative phases. On view are, for instance, “Rice Houses” and “Ziggurats,” a selection of drawings, as well as a pollen field. The exhibition also features Laib’s latest works, the “Towers of Silence.” It thus ties in with an important focus of the collection, since Laib is represented in the Kunstmuseum’s holdings with several exemplary works, and his “Wax Room,” permanently installed since 2005 (in the collection basement), is one of seven rooms of this kind in existence worldwide.
courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Juergen Staack
and Eilike Schlenkhoff
at Kunstverein Marburg
until August 3, 2023
Creating mental images, finding them or leaving them behind, distributing and hiding them, dissolving them and making them appear, these are artistic procedures of Juergen Staack's highly complex work.
Initially, the focus was not only on the translatability of photography into language, but also on the material fragility of the analog and, in its fleetingness, also digital photographic image. What is an image? What is not yet an image? Which codes are necessary to read it? Which ones get lost?
In the age of an all-dominant global image culture, Juergen Staack poses the question of the image-generating foundations and elements in a completely new way. His artistic image criticism takes place in drawings, sound installations, "speaking" images and poetic performances, in which the model of "sender - message - receiver" is sensitively disturbed by the use of illegible codes. They not only demonstrate the serious gaps between perception and communication, but also the limits of pictorial representation.
For example, on his numerous journeys through Asia, Europe, or Yakutia, Staack investigates unusual phenomena such as the Siberian "ice whispering" ("Ice-Whispering," 2013); the worldwide extinction of local language traditions ("Transcription - Image," 2008 and "Unser-Deutsch," 2023) and the cultural traditions and economic survival strategies associated with them - such as the auction language of Japanese tuna traders ("TSUKIJI," 2010) or the telephone numbers of Chinese day laborers illegally affixed to walls ("WEI," 2012). *
Staack's latest works ("TIME", 2022) and ("light-sketch, 2020) extend his "thinking-pictures" by the factor of time and the moment of creation and open another perspective on the question: "What is a picture?".
(excerpt from ANDINGMEN by Sabine Maria Schmidt)
courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Tony Cragg
Sculptures and Works on Paper
at Centre of Contemporary Art in Torun, Poland
until September 10, 2023
Presented in Toruń, the exhibition Tony Cragg. Sculptures and Works on Paper contains 53 mostly large-format sculptures executed in various techniques throughout the artist’s career – from those created in the 1970s to the latest ones, as well as 125 drawings, prints and watercolours. The show has been staged in close collaboration by the artist, Studio Cragg in Wuppertal, and curator Krzysztof Stanisławski.
Tony Cragg’s works are displayed in the Column Hall and the rooms on CoCA’s first floor, taking up a total area of 2,000 square metres, as well as on the ground floor and in the Contemporary Sculpture Park situated next to the CoCA building.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a review of films devoted to his oeuvre, and an extensive programme of educational events and workshops. A catalogue-monograph devoted to Tony Cragg’s creative output will be published, featuring texts by Polish, British and German authors.
courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie I photos: Tomek Maryks
Susan Philipsz
Dybderne
at Kunstmuseum Brandts, Odense, Denmark
until November 4, 2023
In Susan Philipsz's works, sound takes on a sculptural form. This also applies to the exhibition's two works The Depths (2023) and Muffled Drums (2020/2023), where sound is shaped in the sculptures. Here, hymns and drums emerge from the interior of the metal sculptures, where they resonate and then flow on towards the visitors experiencing the work. Depending on where we stand in the exhibition space, the sound will change. The sounds trigger a unique and individual response, and invite us to reflect on our own lives and our own encounter with the depths of darkness and the light of hope, sorrow and joy, life and death.
In the piece The Depths, we hear Philipsz's own untrained singing voice. She sings the Latin psalm verse De Profundis, which in Danish means "from the deep". The Psalm verse originates from the Book of Psalms in the Old Testament. In 1980, the composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) creates a 4-part choral work over the hymn, and it is the work that Philipsz sings in The Depths. In the psalm, we follow a first-person narrator who calls out from a position of powerlessness and desperation. But through the psalm, the I-narrator writes himself out of the depths of his mind to find hope in his faith. A similar movement from darkness to light runs through the voices of the choir. From deep solo parts, to brighter and brighter harmonies, to end in unison.
Susan Philipsz is often inspired by literary references. In this exhibition, Susan Philipsz references a letter written by Oscar Wilde. Wilde writes the letter at the end of his prison sentence when he was convicted because of his romantic relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde begins his letter from the depths; from a position of powerlessness and grief after two years of hard focused labor and isolation. In the first part of the letter, Wilde rages against Douglas. But despite the great hardship that Wilde has experienced, towards the end of the letter he still manages to regain hope and courage. In this exhibition, the choral song is accompanied by muted and pulsating drums that flow from the six barrels in the work Muffled Drums. The heartbeat of the drums represents the unquenchable hope and courage that Philipsz's hymn and Wilde's letter contain. The sounds of the drum can also be reminiscent of a funeral drum announcing a person's death. A connection that the writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) puts into words in his poem A Psalm of Life from 1838:
Art is long and Time is fleeting / And our hearts, though stout and brave / Still, like muffled drums, are beating / Funeral marches to the grave.
courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Edith Dekyndth
L'origine des choses
at Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection
until December 31, 2023
Beginning on 8 February, Edith Dekyndt is taking over the unusual exhibition space of the twenty-four vitrines in the Passage at the Bourse de Commerce to propose a new, previously unseen project.
Following Bertrand Lavier and Anri Sala, Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt will take over the Passage display cases of the Bourse de Commerce. Closely linked to commercialisation and colonisation, the notion of the vitrine arose with industrialisation and the first world’s fairs. It was based on this fact and on the imposing, structural presence of the panoramic canvas in the Rotunda that Edith Dekyndt has constructed her project, which reveals her deep-seated interest in things using the concepts of still life, tableaux vivants, and active objects. The artist is interested in images “as a phenomenon of appearance and resurgence in motion”, as she describes it. Edith Dekyndt uses these subjects to comment on the appearance of the artwork and its status, ultimately to address an ambiguity, a suspension between two states: that of the object and that of the artwork, which she explores to its utmost limits.
The non finito, or unfinished, is a key component of Edith Dekyndt’s work; her particularly open-ended creative process focuses on the notion of process and exploring ideas and experiences. Her study of movement and of the transformation of elements describes the ineffable degrees and variations in atmospheric colour, light, and perspective. For the vitrines at the Bourse de Commerce, Edith Dekyndt has composed loose arrangements of domestic objects (broken, fallen, collected, recovered, posed, covered, repaired, immersed, hung, suspended, floating, or otherwise) that recall the tradition of the theatre of objects, among other things. These arrangements are interspersed with three videos that also address the “fascinating existence of things”.
courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Bernd and Hilla Becher Peis Woche
Fig. Bernd and Hilla Becher Prize Week logo
Tony Cragg
Material in Mind
at Kistefos Museum
April 29 - October 15, 2023
Kistefos is delighted to present the first major survey exhibition in Norway of works by the pre-eminent British sculptor Sir Tony Cragg. The exhibition in the Twist will comprise over 25 sculptures including key works from the Christen Sveaas’ Art Foundation and Collection
Cragg’s sculptures explore the interplay between materials, forms, negative and positive spaces whilst pushing to find new relationships between humans and the material world. The presentation spans the artists prolific 5-decade career; from early found object ‘assemblage’ works inspired by the Arte Povera movement and ‘readymades’, to the technically sophisticated sculptures created in recent years. The artist works in bronze, steel, aluminium, wood, plastic, glass and wax – pushing and challenging the possibilities of these materials. Lauded as one of the world’s most accomplished sculptors, Cragg’s practice is fueled by a lifelong fascination of geology, landscape and relations to natural history.
From the small scale to the monumental, Cragg’s prolific practice is the outcome of a constantly questioning and experimental symbiotic process of thought and making, which always starts with drawing. With the support of his studio, Cragg makes his sculptures by hand, each evolution of thought taking form and inspiring the next.
Sir Tony Cragg represented Great Britian at the Venice Biennale in 1988, and won The Turner Prize the same year. His work is already well represented at Kistsfos with 4 permanent works in the sculpture park. With a aesthetic that appeal to a broad audience, Cragg’s monumental works are a favourite amongst visitors. In addition to the works at Kistefos, works from this internationally acclaimed artist can also be found at Henie Onstad Art Centre, Skulpturlandskap Nordland, Ekeberg Sculpture Park and Astrup Fearnley Museum.
The exhibition marks the first exhibition of sculptures in The Twist and will offer a striking juxtaposition to the buildings impressive architecture.
Tony Cragg, Hardliner. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Michael Richter
stanley brouwn
stanley brouwn
at Dia Art Foundation
Curated by Jordan Carter, with Zuna Maza
Opening April 15, 2023
This presentation coincides with stanley brouwn, the artist’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in the United States, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago April 8–July 31, 2023, co-curated by Jordan Carter and Ann Goldstein, the Art Institute's deputy director and chair and Dittmer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund.
stanley brouwn is made possible by support from Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons, James L. Cahn and Jeremiah J. Collatz, and the David Schwartz Foundation, Inc.
April 13 - July 30, 2023
Vernissage
Thursday April 13, 2023, 6pm
Finissage
Thursday July 15, 2023, 6 pm
photo: Juergen Staack
stanley brouwn
stanley brouwn
at The Art Institute of Chicago
curated by Ann Goldstein and Jordan Carter
April 8 - July 31, 2023
stanley brouwn is co-curated by Ann Goldstein, deputy director and chair and Dittmer Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, and Jordan Carter, curator at Dia Art Foundation and former Art Institute associate curator, Modern and Contemporary Art.
The exhibition will also be presented at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Dates are yet to be determined.
The Art Institute’s presentation coincides with another exhibition devoted to stanley brouwn, also curated by Jordan Carter, at Dia:Beacon.
Major support for stanley brouwn is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Artworkers Retirement Society, the Council for Canadian American Relations, the Society for Contemporary Art through the SCA Activation Fund, and Donna A. Stone.
Additional support is contributed by the Danielson Foundation.
at Ludwig Museum im Deutschherrenhaus
April 4 - June 11, 2023
Tatjana Valsang (born 1963 in St. Tönis) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Klaus Rinke and Dieter Krieg and then worked for a long time without public presentations. During this time she developed her own artistic language. Her paintings show biomorphic structures, which she stages in a complex interplay of colour, form and pictorial space and she is able to emphasise the luminosity of each colour value. Her lines create fascinating rhythmic structures in which energetic dynamics point to something processual that is inherent in nature.
Paint is for me not only important as colour but also as a substance. It gives me the possibility to use natural laws and universal principles that determine my colours, forms, structures and compositions. I see my paintings as natural phenomena.
Valsang lays her canvases on the floor so that the paint can flow. The interplay of brushstrokes, gravity and natural processes creates the painter’s signature colour gradients. The gauzy layers of paint of her wet-on-wet technique sometimes resemble watercolour paintings.
Sometimes it is like a treasure hunt of my own making – and I am surprised myself about what remains on the canvas, delicate like nature, apparently accidental – but ultimately the result of conceptual preparations and years of experience.
Taj Mahal, 2010, Acrylfarbe auf Leinwand, 170 x 220 cm © Tatjana Valsang 2023
Rita McBride
Particulates
at HAMMER MUSEUM
March 26 - November 5, 2023
The Hammer’s new bank gallery opens with Particulates (2021), an installation by Rita McBride (b. 1960, Des Moines, Iowa) that is part of the Hammer Contemporary Collection. Inspired by time travel, the principles of light and space, and quantum physics, this monumental yet ethereal sculpture is a conjunction of water molecules, surfactant compounds, and the beams of high intensity lasers that materialize as they interact with particulates of mist emitted into the space. Particulates exchanges gravity, a core element in sculpture, for the potential of infinitely traversable space. The strange beams of light appear as an apparition inside the space, a former bank space and now a partially renovated gallery, haunted by the residue of corporate architecture inside the office tower designed by Edward Larabee Barnes. Visible at night from Wilshire Boulevard, the sculpture can also be experienced by visitors during the museum’s regular hours.
McBride lives and works in Dusseldorf, Germany and Los Alamos, California. Since 1987 she has created works that explore architectural and sculptural form in small scale objects and large public commissions. The form of Particulates is a multi-helix, hyperboloid structure that is ephemeral and made visible when ambient dust and water molecules encounter the laser beam. McBride first started exploring this form in the 1990s with such towering public works as Mae West (2011), a 170-foot sculpture in the town of Munich-Bogenhausen.
Rita McBride, Particulates, 2017
courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie I Photo: Joerg Lohse
Giuseppe Penone
Universal Gestures
Curated by Francesco Stocchi
March 14 - May 28, 2023
The Secret Gardens will be the setting for the intervention of one of the most important exponents of Arte Povera, Giuseppe Penone, who has always been interested in the relationship between man and nature. Steeped in history, his practice is characterized by the constant union of sculpture with the observation of nature. His works highlight this symbiosis and underline the fluidity that unites all plant, human and mineral elements. The exhibition will take place in the gardens and in a part of the rooms located on the ground floor, highlighting a great osmosis between inside and outside, between park and villa.
Giuseppe Penone, Avvolgere la terra, 2014, aluminum, plaster background and terracotta, 45 x 60 x 15 cm
courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Book Release
Cristina Iglesias
Hondalea
Published by Hatje Cantz, 2023
The lighthouse on the island of Santa Clara in Donostia / San Sebastián stood empty for many years until Cristina Iglesias transformed it into a breath-taking sculptural work that opened to the public in 2021. Inside the restored lighthouse, visitors look down as water rises up, as if from the sea below, surging through forms cast in bronze to resemble the distinctive geology of the Basque Coast, before pooling and trickling away. Featuring extensive photographs of a journey by boat from the city to the island and into the lighthouse, together with writings by art historians, geologists and scientists, Cristina Iglesias – Hondalea documents a remarkable work realized by one of the world’s leading sculptors in the city where she was born.
Order at www.hatjecantz.de
courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body
with Alice Channer
at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK
Curated by Jes Fernie
4 February - 7 May 2023
Trickster Figures presents the next chapter in the story of British sculpture, bringing together a selection of work by eleven contemporary artists. The exhibition explores the body’s newly configured relation to the world which involves increasingly fluid movement between binary systems, technology, human forms, animals, identities, and the environment.
Encompassing sculpture in its widest sense, the exhibition includes play, touch and sound. Works made from crab shells, tree roots, shopping bags, and hosiery sit alongside a dance floor and a water fountain. Discover elements that change and grow, sculptures that are made to be worn, and things that will never be finished.
“There is a leakage, a seepage in these works. Many of them allude to bodies or systems that relate to bodies. Jealous bodies, broken bodies, fossilised bodies, vulnerable, contaminated bodies. There is also love, tenderness, glamour, and compulsion.”
- Jes Fernie
With works by Saelia Aparicio, Alice Channer, Jesse Darling, Nicolas Deshayes, Kira Freije, Siobhán Hapaska, Nnena Kalu, Joe Namy, Harold Offeh, Ro Robertson and Vanessa da Silva.
Photo: Rob Harris
Courtesy the artist and Photos MK Gallery
We are pleased to announce the representation of Candida Höfer.
In March 2023, Konrad Fischer Galerie in Berlin will present a comprehensive solo exhibition with Candida Höfer. Titled Berlin und Anderswo, this exhibition will be on view from March 4 through April 15, 2023.
Candida Höfer’s acclaimed work has been shown in major institutions and collections worldwide. Höfer represented Germany alongside Martin Kippenberger in the La Biennale di Venezia 2003 and participated in Documenta11 in 2002. Her work is part of important museum collections, including MoMA–Museum of Modern Art, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Kunsthalle Hamburg, and Kunsthalle Basel.
Komische Oper Berlin VII, 2020, C-Print, 245 x 180 cm
courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Thomas Schütte
SKULPTUREN
at Skulpturenhalle Neuss
January 13, 2023 onwards
The long tradition of portraiture has been an ongoing resource for Thomas Schütte; it is a continuum which he often analyses and re-invents. Indeed, over many years his practice has been marked in its testing of the limitations of all traditions, genres and mediums.
Julia Peyton-Jones / Hans Ulrich Obrist, Thomas Schütte: Faces & Figures
Thomas Schütte’s work seems to be about finding divergent and unforeseen forms for pictures and images, which for their part have a simple plausibility to them, whether they belong to the standard stock of tradition and convention or are based on puns, sayings, misunderstandings or kindred figures of speech. Unlike the Modernist commandment to innovate, he finds the discrepancies he seeks by using art techniques that are deemed obsolete, as for instance etching in the field of prints, or ceramic in the realm of Sculpture.
Ulrich Loock, Clay Has a Memory, in: Ceramic Spaces
courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Tony Cragg
CRAGG
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Febuary 8 - May 7, 2023
Tony Cragg is one of the most innovative and versatile sculptors in the international contemporary art world. Less well known is that since the outset of his artistic career in the 1970s, he has created an extensive body of drawings in which he »thinks sculpture«. This group of works has grown over decades and its unusual motifs are often a surprise. It acts as a source of inspiration of the highest order and it provides a profound insight into his thought process regarding his own work.
With the exhibition CRAGG, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München once more addresses the question as to the importance of drawing in the 21st century as a driving force within the visual arts and examines its role as an existential form of expression of the human intellect and its creative potency. By presenting drawing and sculpture together our exhibition succeeds in providing unexpected insights that deepen our understanding of Tony Cragg’s artistic œuvre. In the work of no other contemporary sculptor is the creative symbiosis of the two artistic media this fertile.
Tony Cragg, Hedge #01, 2016, Steel, 89 x 92 x 105 cm
courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Juergen Staack
TIME
at Da In Die Front, Düsseldorf
organized by Matthias Grotevent
on Saturdays only, Febuary 4, 11 and 18, 2023, from 1 to 5pm
The Düsseldorf-based artist Juergen Staack shows at Da in die Front the exhibition Time. In spatial relation to each other, three clocks hang on three walls. Their different nature, aesthetics and style refers to the transience of time. A chair from the artist's studio defines another place in the room: one performer at a time takes a seat on the chair and chooses one of the three clocks by choosing his or her own line of vision. In the course of the performance, this person reads out the time at self-determined intervals.
courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
BEADS
with Aleana Egan
at STATIONS, Berlin
January 29 - March 12, 2023
The title for this project, Beads, is borrowed from the educator, artist, writer and psychoanalyst Marion Milner. Milner first uses the term beads and bead memories in her book Eternity’s Sunrise (1987). In Hugh Haughton’s summation of Eternity’s Sunrise, it is, he says; “a home-made, circling and collage like record of a journey of self-exploration.” The beads or bead memories are used to describe a technique of remembering through objects and places. These meditations on lived experience were closer to a poetic language than to a logical one. They also evoked physicality; a continuum and a modular system. Haughton says: “When something becomes a ‘bead’, in other words, it can be fingered and stroked and reflected upon and moved from one place to another, long after the journey it is encountered on is over.”
With works by Dorje de Burgh, Samuel Laurence Cunnane, Aleana Egan, Louise Hopkins, Seda Mimaroğlu and Cecilia Szalkowicz.
curve of a hill like the curve of a green shoulder, 2015, mixed media, 36 x 80 x 120 cm
© the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Phantoms and Other Illusions
with Alice Channer
at Kai 10 / Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf
curated by Ludwig Seyfarth
February 10 – September 3, 2023
Visual deceptions, spatial illusions and suggestions of specific material qualities with completely different materials were already to be found in pictorial and sculptural representations of antiquity. In modern art, however, methods of illusion and deception were rather disapproved of. As Ernst H. Gombrich states in his book Art and Illusion (1960), the ability of craftsmen to imitate nature faithfully was no longer regarded as a genuine artistic quality. Only in the realm of surrealism was it used extensively, in order to make fictions and fantasy worlds appear real.
The penchant for illusion, however, would never be entirely suppressed. Even Conceptual Art, which is generally reluctant to employ lavish visual delights and still exerts its influence on the judgements of taste and art-theoretical discourses today, was interspersed with elements of illusionism. Besides, it would be almost absurd if artists today were not concerned with illusions – considering the increasing number of images and things around us that reveal less and less of how they came about and what degree of reality they possess. Like phantoms, they hover in the space between reality and fiction.
In the exhibition Phantoms and other Illusions, the play with an array of materials between naturalness and artificiality is juxtaposed with objects and installations that fictionalize our experience of space. The equally alluring and delusive promises of advertising and fashion are also questioned through artistic means. Not least, the different semantic layers underlying the concept of illusion are up for debate – including the psychological and political levels.
With works by Dove Allouche, Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis, Alice Channer, Wolfgang Ellenrieder, Friederike Feldmann, Anaïs Lelièvre, Echo can Luo, Marge Monko, Nedko Solakov and David Zink Yi.
Soft Sediment Deformation, Photosynthesising Body (Triple Stretched Fleshy), 2022, Coral-Pleated Inkjet Print on and in Silk Satin, 208 x 120 cm
© the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Bernd & Hilla Becher
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
December 17, 2022 – April 2, 2023
The renowned German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher (1931–2007; 1934–2015) changed the course of late twentieth-century photography. Working as a rare artist couple, they focused on a single subject: the disappearing industrial architecture of Western Europe and North America that fueled the modern era. Their seemingly objective style recalled nineteenth- and early twentieth-century precedents but also resonated with the serial approach of contemporary Minimalism and Conceptual art. Equally significant, it challenged the perceived gap between documentary and fine art photography.
Using a large-format view camera, the Bechers methodically recorded blast furnaces, winding towers, grain silos, cooling towers, and gas tanks with precision, elegance, and passion. Their rigorous, standardized practice allowed for comparative analyses of structures that they exhibited in grids of between four and thirty photographs. They described these formal arrangements as “typologies” and the buildings themselves as “anonymous sculpture.”
Featuring some 200 works of art, this posthumous retrospective celebrates the Bechers’ remarkable achievement and is the first ever organized with full access to the artists’ personal collection of working materials and their comprehensive archive. The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur.
© courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Book Launch
Paul Czerlitzki
DELAY
published by DISTANZ
December 13, 2022
from 4:30 PM
Konrad Fischer Galerie Berlin
Konrad Fischer Galerie cordially invites you to a Christmassy book launch with Paul Czerlitzki. Published by DISTANZ, DELAY is Czerlitzki’s first monograph and showcases works from the past ten years. WiIth essays by Adam Budak, Michal Bund, and Ulrich Loock.
photo: Dinis Santos
© courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Guy Ben-Ner
Go Back Where U Came From
at Tel Aviv Museum of Art
November 8, 2022 - June 17, 2023
This is the first comprehensive exhibition in Israel for Guy Ben-Ner.
Ben Ner gained worldwide recognition with works that interweave his personal life with timeless myths and with seminal literary and cinematic works. His early films engage with the tension between his practice as an artist and fatherhood and family life. They are rooted in the domestic, everyday environment, while relying on familiar cinematic genres: silent cinema, sitcoms, nature films, instructional films and more. In contrast to the highbudget film and television industries, Ben Ner deliberately creates his films with what is most readily available to him: his family members, his home, public spaces, and of course himself. In a spirit of improvisation and inventiveness, he presents a model for inexpensive cinema — and economic independence also becomes part of the message. Many of Ben Ner's works present artistic “guerrilla acts,” such as filming without a permit, using public areas, stealing soundtracks, and vandalizing property. Navigating between private and public spaces, he emphasizes the decisive influence that society, the economy, and politics have on the most intimate relationships —marital and family ties.
Guy Ben-Ner Spies, 2011 Single channel video, 09:00 min., sound | © courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Retrospective of Giuseppe Penone
Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands
October 8, 2022 - January 29, 2023
Museum Voorlinden presents a large retrospective of Giuseppe Penone. The exhibition includes both early and recent work, offers surprises and stimulates all the senses. Voorlinden shows iconic sculptures and immersive installations, alternated with modest and intimate works by Penone.
For Giuseppe Penone, nature is – and trees in particular are – both subject and material. In his sculptures, installations and drawings he incorporates tree trunks, leaves, marble and leather. In his poetic oeuvre he reveals our intimate connection with nature and makes us aware of its creative and transformative cycle and forces. For example, in Ripetere il bosco (1968) Penone peels off the annual rings of a tree to reveal its origins. In this way he unlocks growth processes that often remain invisible to the human eye.
Penone’s work emphasises and reinforces Voorlinden’s relationship between art and nature. Voorlinden has been following his work for a long time. For instance, in the 1990s his bronze sculpture Biforcazione (1991) became part of sculpture garden Clingenbosch. In an era in which our relationship to nature is an important topic, this is the moment to have the highlights from Penone’s oeuvre take over the spaces of Voorlinden.
Giuseppe Penone, Respirare l’ombra I Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Daniel Buren
COMME TOMBEES DU CIEL,
LES COULEURS IN SITU
ET EN MOUVEMENT
October 15, 2022 - October 15, 2023
A monumental, temporary work by Daniel Buren, one of the greatest French artists in the international art scene, will soon be on display at Liege-Guillemins station. The project is an initiative of the Uhoda group, in collaboration with the SNCB and supported by public and private partners. The work, which is in perfect dialogue with the architecture of Santiago Calatrava, will unfold over the entire vault of the building through a play of colors, contrasts, projections and reflections. This magisterial installation will be in constant motion according to the light, the time of day and the season. With this work, the artist transforms the station and gives it a new dynamic. In this way Buren invites the public to look with fresh eyes at architecture, the poetic possibilities of everyday life, the discovery of the unexpected ... The work will be officially presented by Stéphan Uhoda, SNCB and its partners on 15 October 2022. Daniel Buren will also be present. The work of art will be on display until October 15, 2023.
Wolfgang Plöger
It Might be a Mirage
at West Den Haag in the former American Embassy
until January 22, 2023
‘It Might be a Mirage’ is an array of presentations situated in and reflecting on the verge of history, between fact and speculation, information and invention. Featuring works by eight contemporary artists spanning various mediums and techniques, from sculpture and installation, to video, film, and photography, it lends historical realities a sense of uncertainty, defiance, and obsession.
This ensemble of positions highlights art practices that utilize historical narratives, texts, and images, while contesting the ideological conditions on which they were established. At the same time, each of the works on display unleashes a concealed, secretive substance or force. The works presented here point to a timeless core within everyday chronologies by ways of derealization and refabrication, or disruption of the notion and function of historical references. Their current positioning does not stem from a deconstructive-critical stance, nor from a political agenda. It signifies a singular form of perception, an existential vision which infuses the ‘here and now’ with the ‘there and then’, as it undermines conventional categories of time, space, and presence.
The practice of Wolfgang Plöger, born 1971, Münster, Germany, deconstructs our prior knowledge about technical representation, and in particular, about the representation of history. His group of film installations are self-reflexive interventions in time and space, which reevaluate the mechanism and material properties of film projection. They expose and reshape the structure and the fabric of the filmic image, confronting us with the canonically standardized conditions of technological representation, which they radically modify and alter from within.
Wolfgang Plöger, untitled (PLA Blue & Green ), 2022, 40 x 31,5, 3D print, Diptych Photo: Roman März
© the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Kunst Museum Winterthur
Nord – Süd, Perspektiven auf die Sammlung
until 30 October 2022
The profound caesura of the Second World War also resulted in a radical upheaval in art. The martial catastrophe was followed by decades, during which the world was divided into East and West. Concomitantly, reconstruction began, and from the 1950s and 1960s onwards a spirit of optimism characterised society and art. New energies were released, and the traditional ideas of what constituted a work of art were once again questioned after the shock of modernism. The Kunst Museum Winterthur contains a variety of works from the immediate post-war period, but especially of art from the 1960s onwards. One focal point of the collection is Arte Povera, an artistic movement that emerged in Italy in the 1960s with now famous artists such as Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario and Marisa Merz and Giuseppe Penone. Using ‘poor’ materials, they began to contemplate the upheavals of the time, the social reorientation and political crises in Italy. On the occasion of the exhibition Italia, which is taking place concurrently, we are presenting a section of the extensive Arte Povera collection for the first time on the upper floor of the building ‘Reinhart am Stadtgarten’. We juxtapose this with selected positions by artists from the North, especially from Germany. These organised themselves less in groups, but instead gathered around art centres such as Düsseldorf with its famous academy, which became a real epicentre thanks to artists such as Gerhard Richter, Isa Genzken, Pia Fries and Thomas Schütte.
thomas Schütte, 3 Türme, 1983 / 2017, Towers: acrylic paint and pencil on cardboard; Base: Plywood and MDF I © the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
On Kawara
ON
At Kunstzone (art space) in the Lokremise, St. Gallen
until November 6, 2022
It seems incomprehensible, this time that defines our existence like no other dimension. The artist On Kawara always stated the number of days lived as his biography. He lived for 29,771 days. This homage to On Kawara, who created unique works on the topic of time, and his wife, Hiroko Kawahara, brings together five artists. Bethan Huws, Tatsuo Miyajima, Aleksandra Signer, Barbara Signer, and Roman Signer, who have continually approached the flow of time in new ways, will engage in a dialogue with a group of works by On Kawara from the collection of the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen. Biological lifetime and art seem to become identical in On Kawara’s work. His ciphers of existence will be shown in the coherent group of works that his wife Hiroko and the artist himself were able to assemble for St. Gallen in 1997 and 2007. The five selected contemporary artists have once again engaged with the topic and supplemented and expanded their works from the collection of the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in order more precisely react to the artist On Kawara and the ephemerality of time.
© the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
In Dialogue with the Collections of Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein and the Hilti Art Foundation
The focus is on Candida Höfer's photographs, which she has created especially for this show. She mostly photographed the subjects with a large-format digital camera at various locations in Liechtenstein: interior and exterior views of the museums' architecture, libraries or storage, which serve cultural purposes in both narrow and broad senses. In this way they form part of the groups of subjects for which Höfer has become known. Her photographs are juxtaposed in a dialogue with selected artworks from the two collections. An acclaimed artist and a member of the Düsseldorf 'Becher School', Höfer (b. 1944), has previously created a number of site-specific groups of images, for example in Brussels or Düsseldorf; her series created in and for Liechtenstein continues this tradition. A production of Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein and the Hilti Art Foundation curated by Christiane Meyer-Stoll, Letizia Ragaglia and Uwe Wieczorek.
Also on view: Edith Dekyndt and Bruce Nauman.
© the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
BREATHING
at Hamburger Kunsthalle
until January 15, 2023
The large-scale theme-based exhibition explores the various facets of breathing and its representation in the art of the Old Masters and the present day. More than a hundred works are being placed into exciting dialogues, sometimes transcending different eras. The result is an unconventional exchange on an existential topic, shedding a light on what may at first seem like an unconscious, biological process, yet in fact offers multiple social and political dimensions.
Since antiquity, breath has been more than just air flowing in and out of the body. It is a vehicle of life, thought, inspiration and, in many world cultures, also of the soul. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, breathing is regarded as a central moment of the divine act of creation. Breathing suggests life, while its loss is tantamount to death. Yet in everyday life our respiration is often taken for granted; it only comes into focus when it dwindles – due to disease, climate change, pandemics or physical violence. For instance, the last words of George Floyd in 2020 »I can’t breathe« have virtually become a synonym for racist and institutional violence.
© the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
River of Forms: Giuseppe Penone's Drawings
at Philadelphia Museum of Art
24 September 2022 - 26 February 2023
Discover transformative works by artist Giuseppe Penone that explore the relationship between human experience and the natural world. River of Forms examines the central role that drawing plays in his practice and how it has informed many large sculptural works from the 1960s until today.
Nature has offered deep inspiration for the artist throughout his career. Penone incorporates natural materials such as wood, stone, clay, coffee, graphite, charcoal, leaves, and other media in his intensely tactile works, leaving the marks of his own fingerprints, breath, and even teeth.
Celebrating the artist’s extraordinary recent gift of drawings and artist books to the museum, this exhibition of nearly 200 works on paper and a selection of sculptures reflects Penone’s extraordinary range of techniques and materials, and his belief in art as a means of understanding our place in the world.
© the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
TONY CRAGG
Transfer
Museo Novecento, Firenze, Italia
23 September 2022 - 15 January 2023
Curated by Sergio Risaliti and Stefania Rispoli
The English master, one of the most famous exponents of contemporary sculpture, is best known for having contributed to a renewal of the plastic language thanks to the introduction of new materials and new techniques, among the most experimental and innovative of our time.
For the first time, three monumental sculptures will be exhibited in the cloister of the Museo Novecento. The completely new project is conceived as a mediation tool aimed at presenting not only the works (sculptures and drawings) but also the artist’s creative process.
© courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Tony Cragg, Runner, 2017, Bronze, 80 x 53 x 28 cm
Edith Dekyndt
Aria of Inertia
at Pinault Collection
17 - 18 September, 2022
The Pinault Collection’s artist residency welcomed Edith Dekyndt for its second season. The artist paused to describe the projects she developed during her eight months in Lens, which have since been shown in major exhibitions in Europe.
For the first time ever, the Pinault Collection exhibition will form part of Kering’s Women In Motion programme, which shines a light on women in the world of arts and culture. Women In Motion began in 2015 in the field of cinema, but it has since extended to photography (notably through a partnership with the Rencontres d’Arles), music, choreography, art, and design.
The force of Edith Dekyndt’s work stems from her belief that every object is a living organism that interferes and resonates with its host environment. As an artist, she is constantly reconsidering humans’ place in the world and their relationship to their surroundings. In its articulation of the discrepancies between appearance and reality, subjectivity and nature, and inertia and life, Edith Dekyndt’s work asks us to rethink our expectations and habits, ultimately to open our eyes.
Titled Inertial, the exhibition confronts us with the power of being in the world, even for the humblest expressions of life. All the works presented here, from the monumental to the most intimate, emphasise this vitality. The exhibition resonates with the theme of the 2022 Heritage Days of “Sustainable Heritage”.
Edith Dekyndt, Acolyte, Silver leaves on cotton broderie, 145 x 98 cm, 2022 I © courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Bruce Nauman
Neons, Corridors & Rooms
Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milano, Italia
15 September 2022 - 26 Febuary 2023
One of the world’s most prominent living artists, Bruce Nauman (b. Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1941; lives and works in New Mexico) has contributed to writing the history of contemporary art since the mid-1960s, thanks to his pioneering research across a variety of media, including installation, video, sculpture, performance, photography, drawing, and sound. His art is distinguished by an interest in understanding the human experience and its conventions, as well as the inner workings of the psyche, which he investigates through the perception of the body, and interactions with space, time, and language. Nauman’s work also makes frequent use of wordplay, with which he explores alternative methods of communication.
Exhibition organized by Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan, Tate Modern, London, and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
© courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
It is… it isn’t
The Collection of Annick and Anton Herbert
Herbert Foundation - 106
2. October 2022 onwards
The Herbert Collection centres on international avant-garde art created between 1968 and 1989. These two dates anchor the framework in which the Collection situates itself ideologically and represent two historical turning points : the 1968 student-led revolts with their accompanying belief in a makeable world, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the disillusionment with such ideas.
While the Collection began in 1973 with the acquisition of Carl Andre’s 64 Lead Square (1969), its roots date back to the collection of Tony Herbert (1902 – 1959), Anton Herbert’s father. Tony Herbert was one of the foremost collectors of Flemish expressionism and his substantial collection included works by Constant Permeke, Gust De Smet, Jean Brusselmans, Edgard Tytgat, Rik Wouters and Frits Van den Berghe.
Though Annick and Anton Herbert were presented with the opportunity to continue expanding Tony Herbert’s collection after his death, they chose to travel a different path. Fernand Spillemaeckers played a crucial part in this decision by introducing the Herberts to the avant-garde he represented with his Galerie MTL.
The avant-garde artists that the Herberts focussed on when they began the Collection shared a common sensibility in their relentless and critical questioning of traditional notions of artworks, artistry and the art world. In addition to Carl Andre, this included Sol LeWitt, On Kawara, Lawrence Weiner, Marcel Broodthaers, Gilbert & George, Mario Merz, Art & Language, Giulio Paolini, Robert Barry, Gerhard Richter and Bruce Nauman.
© courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Sol LeWitt and Manfred Pernice
Perspectives of a Collection
Taking Stock and Looking Ahead
10. September 2022 – 15. January 2023
The exhibition brings together sculptures, drawings, installations and videos by around 25 artists from different decades of contemporary art, which are staged in a dialogue in thematic chapters such as “Space”, “Body” and “Society” in relation to the unique architecture of the museum.
A look at the Marta Collection offers an opportunity to recapitulate its orientation and open up new perspectives for the future. What about the quota of women in the collection, for example, not to mention other criteria of diversity? And how can artistic positions be represented in a collection in a fundamentally meaningful way? Is an icon of political-feminist art such as Martha Rosler already sufficiently represented by the equally iconic video work “Semiotics of the Kitchen” (1975), which is the oldest work in the collection? How can we resolve the question marks that are written on the faces of many visitors in view of Kaari Upson’s isolated sculpture “Silicon Leftover (5 gal)” (2015)? In order to start here and to illustrate in a representative way how the collection can be thought further, works by four artists from the Marta Collection – Martha Rosler (*1943 in Brooklyn, New York, lives there), Asta Gröting (*1961 in Herford, lives in Berlin), Kaari Upson (*1970 in San Bernardino, California; † 18 August 2021 in New York) and Katja Novitskova (*1984 in Tallin, lives in Amsterdam and Berlin) – will be supplemented by loans.
© courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Harald Klingelhöller
SCHNEFALL ERZÄHLT
Skulpturenhalle Neuss
02. September - 11. December, 2022
Most of Harald Klingelhöller’s sculptures are preceded by linguistic formulations of ideas, memories and suggestions that, after being written down, are partially and repeatedly saved in these sculptures and linked to a spatial experience. Examples of these recurring abstract or poetic textual structures are „Ich bin hier, Du bist hier“ („I am here, you are here“), „In landscapes reacting to words“, „Das Meer bei Ebbe geträumt“ („Dreaming the sea at low tide“) or „Die Welt erzählt“ („The world is telling“), to name just a few. These can be found in the current exhibition in four different sculptural approaches: in the „Sternförmigen“ (star-shaped), the „Schwebenden“ (floating), the „Schrankversion“ (cabinet version) and the „Echo".
Klingelhöller puts the stars at our feet, so to speak. In order to be able to keep them on the ground, he uses solid metal profiles made of copper, brass or lead with a trapezoidal cross-section. The dimensions of the upper viewing sides of the individual star rays are determined by the dimensions of the printed title-giving words, their number by the shape of the star to be formed, hence, for example, „The world is told (twofold, star-shaped)“.
The „Schwebenden“ (floating) are new constellations of previous „Schattenversionen“ (shadow versions) in the artist’s œuvre. Klingelhöller locates the silhouettes of previous sculptures, which have been changed in size, multiplied and deformed into three dimensions, in spatial elements whose scale can only be determined relatively. In these constellations they protrude from a past presence into a fictional future space – playing with temporality and multiple spatiality.
The same is true of the „Echo“, which extends from ceiling to floor and which was measured from the acoustic spectogram of a question posed by the artist – the „echo“ as a medium of spatial depth the question „Will you be there?“ a spatial presence, from an imaginary „you“ to an imaginary „there“.
© courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Tatjana Valsang
STREIFZUG
at Stadtsparkasse Wuppertal - Glashalle
07. September - 04. November, 2022
Adress:
Islandufer 15
Wuppertal-Elberfeld
"Many of Valsang’s paintings appear primal and elemental, loosely biological or biomorphic in look, but each of them is arrived at though a mixture of material treatments, drawing their painterly energy through either dispersal, delineation or direction. These three tendencies all play an important part in the construction and choreography of her compositions - in their artistic energies - and can be discerned either operating individually within a canvas or simultaneously, all working together in unison, layer upon layer, within a single work.
In such works, we find waves of swirling, undulating, folding and unfolding forms coinciding with natural bleeds and contrasting with tight contours and consolidated outlines. Strong lines and colour coalesce, as do chance order."
(Extract from Tatjana Valsang's current catalog LOGBUCH, "A Studio Conversation", Jon Wood, published by DISTANZ Verlag, Berlin, 2020)
© courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Lawrence Weiner
at Dia Beacon
Long-term view
Language is a dominant aspect of Lawrence Weiner’s practice. Conceived as objective representations of states or processes rather than material realities, Weiner’s works are capable of countless manifestations. Although their content is general and abstract, they remain inseparable from their presentation and context. These works could be defined as site-related; they are conceived in relation to the venue and circumstance. Whether the letters are stenciled, painted, or mounted in relief, the choice of typeface, size, placement, and color, varies with the site. The context serves as a vital factor for Weiner’s works. A poster, artist’s book, gallery, or public arena molds the work’s meaning.
Various and versatile, Weiner’s works at Dia Beacon remain dispersive. Visitors interact with them among the sculpture galleries, in a stairwell, and in the café/bookshop. Suspended high over the admissions desk, the artist’s Statement of Intent (1969) attests to his belief that “art always institutionalizes itself,” regardless of placement. Such an active arrangement emphasizes the work of art is completed only through a viewer’s potential reception and adoption.
Lawrence Weiner, installationview, 2008 I Konrad Fischer Galerie I courtesy Konrad Fischer Galerie
at MAXXI—National Museum of 21st Century Arts
until February 19, 2023
MAXXI L’Aquila—National Museum of 21st Century Arts presents Afterimage, an international group exhibition that explores the persistence in and around us of what has materially disappeared.
The show features 26 international artists from different generations and includes newly commissioned pieces and site-specific installations, historical works belonging to the MAXXI Collection together with monographic rooms, with works spanning from the 1960s to the present day.
Curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi e Alessandro Rabottini, Afterimage is a meditation upon memory and metamorphosis and looks at the unpredictable forms—both material and metaphorical—in which what has vanished silently endures within spaces, bodies, and meanings.
The title of the show refers to the optical illusion of the residual image, which happens when a visual stimulus generates an impression on the retina that remains even after the stimulus has disappeared, as happens, for example, with the camera flash.
© Paloma Varga Weisz, Woman, burnt, 2013, 112 x 53 x 40 cm I courtesy Konrad Fischer Galerie
Peter Buggenhout
III. The tragic death of Nauru Island
at Palazzo Bollani
08 September - 27 November, 2022
The third act tells the story of extractivism, pollution and extinction — the hypothesis of a catastrophic sublime.
It is steeped in the history of the island of Nauru, located in Micronesia in the Pacific Ocean.
In the 1970s, this tiny independent island became the world’s wealthiest country per capita because of its huge phosphate deposits. Today, the impoverished state is nothing but a spent, desolate, sterile landscape. Its story can be seen as the parable of extractivism gone mad, but also as the image of the negative sublime of pollution, the exhaustion of natural resources, and mass extinctions. It also sheds light on why contemporary artists now scrutinise the planet with a molecular eye, focusing on chemistry and organic compounds. After all, it was a mineral phosphate that caused the tragic fate of Nauru Island.
The Anthropocene, that is, the civilization of climate change, is haunted by a great fear: the impossibility of reweaving a world, of reconstituting what is dislocating before our very eyes. In other words, the feeling that it is already too late. That the myths of the flood and of Noah’s Ark are no longer myths, but rather an unavoidable reality. We are engulfed and submerged by catastrophe. Oil slicks are the most spectacular form of pollution. It is an imbalance, a disorder.
Peter Buggenhout, I am the table #2, 2020 I © courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Manfred Pernice
Under Construction - New Acquisitions for the Nationalgalerie’s Collection
at The Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin
until 15. January, 2023
The Hamburger Bahnhof is holding an exhibition entitled Under Construction, which will present the latest additions to the Nationalgalerie collection. The museum has been able to acquire these new objects over the past few years thanks in large part to funding from the Freunde der Nationalgalerie.
Ever since the institution was founded in 1861, the collection of the Nationalgalerie has continually been expanded to include contemporary works from each passing era. The collection has been “under reconstruction” since the exhibition and research project Hello World: Revising a Collection (2018), which reflected on the political and cultural ramifications of the Nationalgalerie’s approach to collecting, and called for non-Western art movements and transcultural approaches to be incorporated into the museum’s practices and collections.
In a presentation of selected new acquisitions, which since 2005 have been made possible in great part thanks to the support of the Stiftung des Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie für zeitgenössische Kunst, the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin is showing works by international artists in various media, including painting, installation, sculpture, video and works on paper.
Manfred Pernice, Beratung, 2012 I courtesy Konrad Fischer Galerie
TREASURE HOUSE & LABORATORY 25 years Museum Kurhaus Kleve
until 20 November 2022
The Museum Kurhaus Kleve, one of the most important art museums in North Rhine-Westphalia, is celebrating its 25th
anniversary in 2022. This offers the welcome opportunity to take stock of the diversity of contemporary art with regard to the past exhibition history, the acquisitions associated with it and in particular the artists involved.
With "Schatzhaus & Labor" a multi-layered exhibition organism is presented, which tells a multi-faceted identity history of the Museum Kurhaus Kleve by concentrating on 25 positions.
They are supplemented by 5 new artistic positions that have never been shown in Kleve before, which give new impulses and act like mirrors of our time. The interweaving of memory and new beginnings is understood as the leitmotif of the selection and as a questioning of the possibilities of artistic activity in general. Because in a world that is inevitably moving in catastrophe mode, the freedom and intensity of art remain indispensable stimuli for intellectual survival.
© Poster Treasury & Laboratory
RICHARD LONG AND ON KAWARA
MOT Collection:
Rewinding the Collection 2nd
at MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART TOKYO
until 16 October 2022
The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo houses approximately 5,500 artworks in its extensive collection, which spans the modern and contemporary periods with a focus on art of the postwar years. Each installment of the “MOT Collection” exhibition introduces artworks in the collection from various themes and angles in its effort to convey the diverse appeal of contemporary art. This is the sequel to the exhibition, “MOT Collection: Rewinding the Collection” (held 2020-2021), which presented a variety of works in chronological order while unraveling the history of the collection including works that were transferred from the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum upon the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 1995.
On this occasion, the MOT rewind to the 1960s when artists of the anti-art movement such as KUDO Tetsumi had come together to present work in the "Yomiuri Independent Exhibition,” and from there introduce various episodes regarding the exhibit of specific works and the history of the museum in an attempt to trace the various events leading up to the time in which the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum actively began developing its collection and organizing special exhibitions in tow with the completion of its new building in 1975. Furthermore, we present a selection of acquisitions from the 1980s to 1990s, and particularly in the third floor section, shed light on works collected in relation to various artists such as Richard LONG, ISHIUCHI Miyako, and ENDO Toshikatsu while focusing on a number of special exhibitions held at the two museums.
Richard Long, Along the Way, 2018 I courtesy Konrad Fischer Galerie
Bernd & Hilla Becher
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
July 15 - November 6, 2022
The renowned German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher (1931–2007; 1934–2015) changed the course of late twentieth-century photography. Working as a rare artist couple, they focused on a single subject: the disappearing industrial architecture of Western Europe and North America that fueled the modern era. Their seemingly objective style recalled nineteenth- and early twentieth-century precedents but also resonated with the serial approach of contemporary Minimalism and Conceptual art. Equally significant, it challenged the perceived gap between documentary and fine-art photography.
Using a large-format view camera, the Bechers methodically recorded blast furnaces, winding towers, grain silos, cooling towers, and gas tanks with precision, elegance, and passion. Their rigorous, standardized practice allowed for comparative analyses of structures that they exhibited in grids of between four and thirty photographs. They described these formal arrangements as “typologies” and the buildings themselves as “anonymous sculpture.”
This posthumous retrospective celebrates the Bechers’ remarkable achievement and is the first ever organized with full access to the artists’ personal collection of working materials and their comprehensive archive.
The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Studio Bernd & Hilla Becher and Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur.
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher
Wolfgang Laib
Listen to the Sound of the Earth Turning: Our Wellbeing since the Pandemic (Group exhibition)
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
June 29 - November 6, 2022
Since 2020, an invisible virus has stolen away our everyday, and wrought havoc on our way of life and state of mind. Under these circumstances much artistic expression, including contemporary art, resonates more keenly than ever. Listen to the Sound of the Earth Turning explores ways to live this new life as the pandemic persists, and the nature of “wellbeing” that is the holistic health of both body and mind, from multiple perspectives found in contemporary art. Works on subjects with a connection to life and existence - nature and humans, the individual and society, family, the repetitious nature of daily living, the spiritual world, life and death - will encourage us to consider what it means to “live well.”
The title of the exhibition is a quote from a piece of instruction art (*) by Yoko Ono, and invites us to expand our consciousness to encompass all the majesty of the cosmos, reminding us that we are no more than a tiny part of its workings, and guiding us toward new ways of thinking. As we address questions of human life in the world at an essential level now that the pandemic has struck us, perhaps it is this very imagination that will present to us possibilities for the future.
Curated by Kataoka Mami (Director, Mori Art Museum), Kumakura Haruko (Assistant Curator), Tokuyama Hirokazu (Associate Curator, Mori Art Museum)
Photo: Ito Tetsuo | Wolfgang Laib installing Pollen from Hazelnut at Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi, 2003
Tony Cragg
Sculpture: Body and Soul
at ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna
until 6 November 2022
In this presentation, the ALBERTINA Museum turns an esteeming spotlight on the internationally acclaimed oeuvre of Tony Cragg, born in Liverpool in 1949 and now a resident of Wuppertal and Berlin, for the first time with a selection of ca. 20 sculptures and just as many drawings.
The development of Cragg’s sculptural output over time reveals a progressive shift from figurative to abstracted forms while his inclusion of unconventional materials such as fiberglass and Kevlar alongside wood, stone, and stainless steel renders the perceptibility of his sculptures’ presence within a given space highly variable.
Tony Cragg | In Frequencies, 2019 | © Tony Cragg / Bildrecht, Wien 2022
Giovanni Anselmo
Dove le stelle si avvicinano di una spanna in più
Where the stars are coming one span closer
Opening:
on Thursday, June 9, 2022 at 12.30
The sculpture, permanently exhibited in the center of the Grand Parterre of the Gardens of La Reggia di Venaria, will be officially inaugurated on June 9, 2022.
Giovanni Anselmo, installationview, 01. May 2015 - 01. Aug 2015, KFG Berlin, courtesy Konrad Fischer Galerie
Tony Cragg
at La Reggia di Venaria
Opening:
on Thursday, June 9, 2022 at 12.30
Tony Cragg, Stack, 2018, patinated bronze, 90.00 x 38.00 x 50.00 cm, courtesy Konrad Fischer Galerie
Christina Iglesias
LANDSCAPE AND MEMORY
at Madison Square Park, NYC
Cristina Iglesias will unearth the forgotten terrains and geographic history of Madison Square Park in Landscape and Memory, a newly-commissioned public art installation and her first major temporary public art project in the United States. Landscape and Memory will place five bronze sculptural pools, each with intricately patterned bas reliefs that feature water gently flowing and arriving in different sequences, into the park’s Oval Lawn. These sculptural works harken back to when the Cedar Creek—now buried underground—coursed across the land where the park stands today. Building on Iglesias’ practice of unearthing the forgotten and excavating natural history, Landscape and Memory resurfaces in the imaginations of contemporary viewers the now-invisible force of this ancient waterway. The installation will be on view from 1 June through 4 December 2022.
This new commission will be launched with a symposium, Unearthing Public Art, at the SVA Theatre in New York on 3 June 2022. Informed by the themes in Iglesias’ work, this symposium will be a multidisciplinary forum for participants to exchange their ideas on working in the public the realm.
Cristina Iglesias, Landscape and Memory, 2022, (detail) installation in Madison Square Park, Photo credit: Rashmi Gill
Thomas Ruff
Metaphotography
14 May - 28 August 2022
The MAMC+ is presenting the first exhibition in a French museum by Thomas Ruff.
This retrospective gaze concerning over forty years of his career aims to reveal the way in which the artist tirelessly questions the photographic medium itself, developing a “meta-photography”. Through a selection of seventeen series, including one as yet unseen (Bonfils, 2022) the visit of around one hundred artworks restores a chronology of the various types of imagery and technical processes that he investigates, thus implicitly retracing a history of photography.
Thomas Ruff started his series of Interiors and Portraits in the 1980s, when he was still a student of Bernd Becher at the fine arts academy Kunstakademie, in Düsseldorf. Although these artworks became emblematic of his work, he nevertheless explored many other approaches to photography, choosing from the 1990s to use only pre-existing images, which he manipulates. The titles of his serial experiments illustrate the continually renewed diversity of his subjects, which the exhibition reflects: Stars, Press Photographs, Nights, Nudes, Portraits, ma.r.s, Photograms, Flowers, Chinese Paintings, and so on.
Photo : A. Mole / MAMC+
Sail/Canvas – Canvas/Sail (Voile/Toile – Toile/Voile)
21 May - 22 May 2022
You are cordially invited to experience Daniel Buren’s two-part public artwork Sail/Canvas – Canvas/Sail (Voile/Toile – Toile/Voile) in Espoo’s Nuottaniemi Bay. In the event, Buren’s famous stripes will appear on the Optimists’ sails in a regatta organized in collaboration with the Espoo Pursiseura Yacht Club EPS. After the race, the sails will be displayed at EMMA until the end of the exhibition.
The regatta will take place on May 21 or May 22 at 2pm, weather permitted. The date will be updated on EMMA’s website closer to the date. No advance registration required.
Photo: Daniel Buren, Voile/Toile-Toile-Voile, work in situ, 1975-2005, regatta on Lake Grasmere, Grasmere, 2005. Detail. © DB-ADAGP Paris.
Paloma Varga Weisz
The Searchers
at HDTS 2022
9 April – 22 May 2022
HDTS 2022 emerges from a heavy felt shift in both culture-at-large and our local desert communities. Its title The Searchers shines light on the “regenerative ruin,” a concept that follows 21st century human intervention in our desert region. As a historically nomadic environment, the desert has played host to waves of different existences—transitory settlements, sanctuaries, and living experiments. This particular desert, at the bottom of the dense Mojave, occupies a fringe space between the western apexes of Los Angeles and Las Vegas where these experiments flourish. Its uniqueness lies in the many ungoverned moments, layered visions, and transposed uses of space that comprise a landscape full of attempted solutions to the basic question of “How to live?”
FOREIGN BODY
Part of Southern California’s architectural legacy lies in buildings whose form literally illustrates their function – lunch stands in the shape of hot dogs, coffee shops constructed as doughnuts, keyboard shaped piano bars. Weisz revives this tradition with a gigantic female figure. Sitting atop its structure, this monumental yet melancholy nude has been pierced by a tree. She emblematizes nature and its slow mutilation by humans.
© Paloma Varga Weisz
Alice Channer
The Searchers
at HDTS 2022
9 April – 22 May 2022
Rockpool
An 8-inch-tall, 60-foot-long salt-filled sculpture intricately curved from steel takes its
h o r i z o n t a l form from satellite images of the 2010 British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This abstracted shape is s t r e t c h e d across the expansive California desert where sparkling salt crusts left by an ancient extinct ocean are extracted en masse, including for the fracking industry.
© Alice Channer
The window, the membrane between inside and outside, becomes sculpture: from March to November 2022, the Waldfrieden Sculpture Park presents a series of three consecutive exhibitions in which, for the first time, the architecture of an exhibition hall becomes the artistic point of departure.
Daniel Buren, Tatsuo Miyajima and Bettina Pousttchi will realise a new work for the glass façade of the exhibition hall in the lower park area for three months at a time.
The viewers reach the hall from the higher park area via a slightly sloping footpath. The initial view of the hall and the artwork gives way to an under-view as soon as one stands in front of the hall.
Each work is applied directly to the large window front of the main façade and visually and conceptually connects the outside space, the park, with the inside space of the hall. The window itself thus becomes the object. The interplay between the outside and the inside, the changing light conditions in the change of day and seasons and the shadow drawings on the hall floor and walls, create a multi-layered associative image. The hall remains deliberately empty for each exhibition for further objects.
The three artists from three generations each stand for an independent artistic oeuvre that has been internationally recognised for many years. In the Waldfrieden Sculpture Park, they are brought together for the first time in the context of this exhibition series.
Photo-souvenir: Daniel Buren, 2022, detail. © Photo: Michael Richter
TONY CRAGG
NEW WORKS
at Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden
Tony Cragg's artistic work unfolds in a restless process of exploring the possibilities of material and reshaping the world around us. His aphorism that "there are many more things that do not exist than do exist" points to a wellspring of things and forms that are still beyond our perception. For Cragg, sculpture is a method of tapping into this enormous potential of new forms and their associated meanings, dreams and languages.
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; Foto: Michael Richter
Wolfgang Laib. Crossing the River
at Bündner Kunstmuseum
19 March – 31 July 2022
Wolfgang Laib (*1950) is considered to be one of the most important artists of today. His work is characterised by a profound relationship with nature and a declared belief in simplicity. At the same time eastern philosophies from India have shaped his life and his artistic practice since the 1970s. Until today the artist concentrates on just a few cyclical groups of work.
Ever since his journeys to India as a young man the idea inspired him to see humans as part of a largerwhole. He also follows this way of life in his art. Thereby the artist tracks down the universal, the eternal and works with natural materials such as pollen, rice, milk or bees wax. However, he also finds this holistic understanding in our culture. In the juxtaposition between a small mound of colour-intensive pollen and a eucharist casket Wolfgang Laib creates an astonishing relationship. The presentation is in a laid-out field of thousands of rice mounds. As an important foodstuff rice symbolises vitality and is fundamental for our earthly existence. With the temporary installation the artist manifests the spiritual dimension of art and leads us directly to the source of his poetics.
Accompanying the exhibition is a richly illustrated publication by Lars Müller Publishers with text contributions and installation views.
Images: Wolfgang Laib, Crossing the River, 2022 © Wolfgang Laib
DANIEL BUREN
Going for a Walk in a Zigzag
EMMA | Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland
02 March – 17 July 2022
For EMMA, Daniel Buren has created an enormous new work Les Paravents consisting of countless folding screens, inviting visitors to take a walk through the zigzagging maze. In this site‑specific piece, the screens embody Buren’s signature themes of impermanence and mutability.
The exhibition will also spill outside the walls of the museum with a line‑up of open‑air events and interventions.
For a week, Buren’s signature vertical stripes enlives Helsinki’s and Espoo’s winter landscape on over 300 JCDecaux billboards across the two cities.
Also featured is Ployer/Déployer, an open‑air piece of 105 striped flags to fill Espoo’s Tapionaukio square in May.
Buren’s famous stripes will additionally appear on the sails of optimist dinghies competing in a regatta on Nuottaniemi Bay in a piece called Voile/Toile ‑ Toile/Voile [Sail/Canvas – Canvas/Sail], organised in collaboration with the Espoo Pursiseura Yacht Club EPS.
Finally, striped vests will transform the museum’s customer service personnel into a living part of a work called Vests (Essai hétéroclite : Les Gilets, travail situé), throughout the duration of the exhibition.
The exhibition is curated by Arja Miller in collaboration with the Director of the Danish art agency Creator Projects, Simon Friese.
© Daniel Buren, Adagp, Paris, 2022. Photo. Ari Karttunen
TONY CRAGG
MADE ON EARTH
The Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (HEART), Denmark
26.02.2022 - 22.08.2022
HEART presents the first retrospective exhibition in Denmark featuring works by the pre-eminent British sculptor Tony Cragg. The exhibition spans Cragg's entire oeuvre from his 1970s black-and-white photographs and rough sculptures made of garbage over the colourful 1980s works that gave him his breakthrough to the virtuoso sculptures created in recent years.
photo: © Tony Cragg, courtesy HEART Museum
Photographs by August Sander and Bernd & Hilla Becher
Kunstarchiv Kaiserwerth
15.01.22 - 29.05.22
Sifting through the archives of both August Sander and Bernd and Hilla Becher continues to reveal new perspectives on their photographic work. Thus, the exhibition dedicated to the two positions juxtaposes two previously largely unknown circles of motifs. On the one hand, there are more than 50 black-and-white photographs by August Sander, primarily from the 1930s, of water castles steeped in history, industrial plants, and views of towns (including Düsseldorf), for example, which paint a multifaceted portrait of the cultural landscape of the Lower Rhine. On the other hand, equally black-and-white, large-format views by Bernd and Hilla Becher, taken in the Rhine harbor in Düsseldorf and surrounding industrial areas, prove to be a discovery. Between 1978 and 1990, they had documented historic warehouses and functional buildings there in the matter-of-fact style typical of their work.
photo: © Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Köln; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2021.
The KunstBüdchen shows under the title "Hans-Peter Feldmann. Kunstausstellung" four finely coordinated works of the artist from the subject area of women.
The Kunstbüdchen is a small exhibition space in a former kiosk, designed as a showcase, open to public view at any time. Small mechanical toys and the "Voyeur" in its last edition can be purchased through the integrated vending machine.
The exhibition was created in collaboration with Konrad Fischer Galerie and Gregor Jansen, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, and can be seen until April 29, 2022.
KunstBüdchen | Speestr. 43a | 40885 Ratingen
www.kunstbuedchen.online
photo: Max Tünkers | Courtesy Konrad Fischer Galerie
Minimal / Conceptual:
Dorothee and Konrad Fischer and the Art Scenes in the 1960s and 1970s
January 22, 2022 － March 13, 2022
AICHI PREFECTURAL MUSEUM OF ART
Minimal art and Conceptual art are two trends which brought about decisive changes to art in the latter half of the twentieth century. Minimal art developed mainly in the US and is characterised generally by its use of industrial materials and ready-made articles such as metal plates and fluorescent lights, simple geometric forms like squares and cubes and their repetition, etc. Conceptual art, which emerged after Minimal art and spread internationally during the same period, emphasized the artist's thoughts more than the material work produced by the artist. In Conceptual art, the idea or concept was considered the most important element in art.
Konrad Fischer, who studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and was active as an artist, promptly showed an understanding of the artists demonstrating these new trends. Together with his wife Dorothee, he opened an exhibition space in Düsseldorf in 1967. There, through innovative processes, they realised exhibitions together with young American and European artists. Rather than having the completed works sent from the artist's studio, Dorothee and Konrad Fischer had the artist come to produce the works in Düsseldorf. Alternatively, based on instructions sent by the artist, Fischer would carry out the production and display of the works together with craftsmen or engineers at the exhibition space.
Dorothee and Konrad Fischer collected works by the artists whose exhibitions they had undertaken and, at the same time, kept multifarious archive materials such as letters, instruction notes, and drawings concerning the production process. These works and archive materials have been acquired in recent years by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, as the Dorothee and Konrad Fischer Collection and Archive.
The exhibition travels to
Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe 26 March - 29 May 2022
Wolfgang Laib and Richard Long
at Diriyah Biennale: Feeling the Stones
11.12.2021 - 11.03.2022
The Diriyah Biennale Foundation has announced Monday the theme for Saudi Arabia’s first contemporary art Biennale titled “Feeling the Stones”.It is inspired by the idea of “crossing the river by feeling the stones,” a slogan that emerged during the 1980s as a metaphor for action at a time of social and economic transformation. The Biennale will take place at JAX district in Diriyah from Dec.11, 2021 to March 11, 2022.
Philip Tinari, director and chief executive of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing and curator of the Biennale, said: “We hope that this exhibition will expose new generations of viewers to global contemporary art, not just as a mode of visual expression but as a space for critical thinking. The art scene in Saudi Arabia finds itself at a crucial juncture, and art has an important role to play in reflecting on key issues of the moment.”
photo: Courtesy the artist
Thomas Schütte
Georg Kolbe Museum Berlin
19.11.2021 - 22.02.2022
The exhibition at the Georg Kolbe Museum comprises around 30 sculptures and numerous works on paper - including works created as recently as 2021. These are complemented by a selection of conceptual-architectural models with which the artist has been addressing the revolutionary spatial principles of modernism for many years. Whether organic-figurative or space-creating and abstract, all of Schütte's works can be read as a call to acknowledge the complexity of cultural-historical dynamics, discourses, and modes of representation. With multi-layered, historically conscious representations that are both radical and sensitively differentiated, Thomas Schütte addresses questions that are closely linked to the research work of the Georg Kolbe Museum. And it is not least the direct reference to Kolbe's former context of activity, today's museum and former sculptor's studio, that makes his work experienceable in a completely new way.
photo: Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Daniel Buren
Pavoisé - travail in situ
Palais de l'Élysée
While the FIAC is just starting and the capital is buzzing again with multiple artistic initiatives, let's throwback to the exceptional work Pavoisé by Daniel Buren at the Palais de l’Élysée.
Photos-souvenirs : Daniel Buren, Pavoisé, travail in situ, jardin d’hiver • winter garden, Palais de l’Élysée, Paris, septembre • September 2021. Détails • Details
© DB-ADAGP Paris, 2021. Photo. DR. Courtesy the artist and kamel mennour, Paris/London
Riachard Long
BANG! City Festival of the Big Bang
at Museum Leuven
22.10.2021 - 20.03.2022
Richard Long has primarily made walking the medium for his art, with nature and wilderness landscapes his main inspiration. In making long walks around the world, he often makes sculptures along the way, marks of passage and transformation. His work in geometric shapes emphasise both the order and diversity of the cosmos. They can be considered as metaphors for existence and reflect his ideas about travel, places, distance, time, space and movement.
BANG! is a city festival organised by KU[N]ST Leuven in collaboration with players from the cultural, scientific and tourist sectors. In this context M will host another exhibition ‘Imagination of the universe’ aside from the Richard Long exhibition. Central to these exhibitions is man's amazement at the creation of the cosmos.
Photo: Achim Kukulies
Edith Dekyndt
VISITATION ZONE, CHAPTER III
at 91.530 Le Marais, Château du Marais, near Paris
For Visitation Zone Edith Dekyndt engaged in parallel acts of preservation; making visible a bed of segments of dust and dirt accumulated on-site over the years on top of which she placed glass vitrines filled with fermented products (tied to the region’s pickling heritage). It serves as a reminder that in giving presence to the neglected we might uncover the processes that decelerate time, offering a potential to heal thoughts and map out an alternative existence for imagining another future.
Photo: Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Minimal / Conceptual:
Dorothee and Konrad Fischer and the Art Scenes in the 1960s and 1970s
October 9, 2021 － January 10, 2022
Minimal art is known as a trend in art which developed mainly in the US during the 1960s. Its use of industrial materials and ready-made items such as brick, metal plates, or fluorescent lights and its compositions employing and repeating simple geometric forms like squares and cubes can be cited as general characteristics of this trend.
In Conceptual art, which appeared after Minimal art and spread during the same period, the idea of the work is more important than the actual object produced. The most significant element in art was considered to be the idea or concept. Without being limited to any particular form, diverse mediums and forms ranging from language, photographs, videos, printed matter, daily use commodities, or natural things to the artist’s own body were employed.
The gallery Konrad Fischer opened in Düsseldorf in 1967 became one of the international bases where such new tendencies in art were introduced. While making contacts with young artists in the US and Europe, Fischer realized exhibitions through unconventional processes. Rather than paying a huge sum to transport the finished works from abroad, he invited the artists themselves to Düsseldorf and had them create their works there. Alternatively, based on instructions provided by the artist, Fischer and engineers, etc. would undertake the execution and installation of the display.
The exhibition is co-organized by and based on works from the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
Carl Andre, Cloud & Crystal / Lead Body Grief Song (Wolke & Kristall / Blei Leib Leid Lied), 1996
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
© Carl Andre / VAGA at ARS, NY / JASPAR, Tokyo 2021
Nanowires
Permanent public sculpture commission for the Engineering Department at the University of the West of England
The University of the West of England Engineering Department, Video interview with Professor Ioannis Ieropoulos, whose research alongside the bodies of electricity generating bacteria inspired Nanowires, 18th November 2021
The University of the West of England Engineering Department, Video interview with Alice Channer, 18th November 2021
Nanowires, 2021
Sand-Cast, Painted, Vapor-Blasted and Chromed Aluminium;
Rolled and Mirror-Polished Aluminium Tube
5 parts each approx 433 x 77-51 cm
photo: Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
curated by Alicia Holthausen and Gregor Jansen.
Some 8,400 Japanese people currently live in Düsseldorf—the largest Japanese community in Germany and the third-largest in Europe after London and Paris. In addition to numerous Japanese companies, institutions, businesses and initiatives, the Japanese influence is also evident in the city’s art scene: since the 1960s, more than three hundred artists of Japanese origin have completed their studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
The members of the Japanese community have established friendships with the people of Düsseldorf. In 2021, the Japanese-German friendship will also officially commemorate its 160th anniversary. In the context of this anniversary year, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf thus aims to celebrate friendship and invited five of its friends of Japanese origin to a joint group exhibition.
Each of these artists associated with the Düsseldorf Art Academy was in turn asked to invite an artist friend of his or her own to the group show.
Artists: Takeoka Yūji, Nara Yoshitomo, Murase Kyōko, Andō Yukako, Kinoshita Ryō, Karin Sander, Nakahara Masao, Anca Muresan, Magdalena Jetelová und Arakawa Sōya
Photo: Katja Illner
Lethality and Vulnerability
part of Afterness (Group), a series of major new commissions by Artangel at Orford Ness, UK
1st July - 30th October 2021
Artangel, Afterness (Group), project information
Lethality and Vulnerability,
2021
Rolled Aluminium Tube; Mirror Polished, Lazer Cut
Folded and Welded Aluminium Sheet
Approx 628cm x 550cm x 273cm
photo: Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Charlotte Posenenske and Gregor Schneider
THE WAY WE ARE 3.0 (Group exhibition) at Museum für moderne Kunst Weserburg
20.03.2021 - 23.01.2022
curated by Ingo Clauß and Janneke de Vries
The exhibition brings together more than 190 works from different eras and contexts and addresses both contentual and formal issues. Seven thematic areas formulate artistic approaches to depicting the human being, develop a current picture of Germany, engage in multifaceted play with everyday life or the medium of the book, and investigate minimalist tendencies, photographic procedures or aesthetic contradiction. Moreover, spaces devoted to Kapwani Kiwanga, Joyce Pensato, Claudia Piepenbrock and Norbert Schwontkowski offer a dense array of insights into four artistic procedures with quite diverse emphases. And with Mel Chin an artist’s bar even makes an appearance.
Photo: Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
The different motifs have been executed in various formats, editions and as chromogenic prints and stereo photos.The works on show at Konrad Fischer Galerie Berlin are the Riehl House built in 1907 for the philosopher Alois Riehl in Potsdam, being the first contract for the young architect, the Werner House, built in 1917 for the engineer Ernst Werner and his wife, and the Lemke House, built in 1932 for Mr & Mrs Lemke in Alt Hohenschönhausen. The Lemke House was the last project Mies realized before leaving Germany in 1938. The house is used today as the Mies van der Rohe House, Berlin.
Gallery hours August 20-22:
Friday 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Saturday 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Thomas Ruff, h.l.b.01 (2001), C-Print, from the series l.m.v.d.r., Haus Lemke, Berlin Alt-Hohenschönhausen, built by Mies van der Rohe in 1932
Photo: Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Peter Buggenhout at Kunstenfestival Watou 2021
curated by Benedicte Goesaert, Chantal Pattyn and Peter Verhelst
Poperine, Belgium
03.07.2021 - 05.09.2021
The 40th edition represents movement, harmony, humanity and intensity. ‘Watou 2021’ is as an outstretched hand to experience poetry and visual art with brains, senses and feelings, thus being filled with the multi-layered nature of art. ‘Watou 2021’ starts from within mankind himself. The curators ask themselves the question: What is our role and position in this world?
Photo: Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Thomas Schütte
Hütte (2016-2021)
Kunsthaus Zug, Daheimpark
ab 18. Juni 2021
Der markante und für alle Besucher offene Holzbau, der für fünf Jahre in unmittelbarer Nachbarschaft zum Kunsthaus Zug bleiben wird, passt sich sorgsam in die Anlagen des Daheimparks ein - ein schwebender Pavillon, eine offene Bühne für das Sehen der Umgebung.
Den Daheimpark wählte der Künstler selbst als Standort aus. Humorvoll spielt der Titel mit dem Namen des Künstlers. Das Werk „Hütte“ in Zug ist die erste langfristige Realisation einer Schütte-Architektur in der Schweiz.
Photo: Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Rita McBride
Mirrors and Windows (Group) at Sammlung Philara
18.06.2021 - 03.10.2021
Rather than reproducing further gender-based territories, the exhibition's formal set up is aimed at creating a multi-voiced space of diverse, brilliant artistic approaches and experiences. The works featured at the Philara Collection bear similarities in how they question their own position and draw boundaries to and reflect on power structures at the time of their creation. This includes practices of negotiating gendered role attributions, addressing the interaction of private and public policies, questioning traditional language conventions and prerogatives of interpretation and implementing strategies of appropriation and exertion of influence. Alongside renowned positions of contemporary art, the exhibition highlights works by women as yet remaining unknown to a larger audience, since they were only marginally registered by the system of their time or their recognition was carried over into the present less prominently.
Photo: Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Bernd & Hilla Becher
Photo & Druckgraphik
Kunstarchiv Kaiserswerth
12.06.2021 - 19.12.2021
Photographien von Bernd und Hilla Becher werden Druckwerken aus dem Gebrauchskontext von Präsentationen und Publikationen gegenübergestellt, die die Entwicklung ihres einflussreichen Werkschaffens wie auch die Rezeptionsgeschichte exemplarisch vor Augen führen. Der Blick auf Plakate, Kunstdrucke, Bücher, Broschüren, Zeitschriften, Einladungskarten in Kombination mit analog gefertigten Photographien vermittelt einen lebhaften Eindruck der vielen Auftritte und Lesarten, die die Motivwelt der Bechers zwischen den 1960er- und 2010er-Jahren international durchlaufen hat.
Photo: Bernd & Hilla Becher, Gasbehälter Wetter, 1969, Gasbehälter Bonn, 1992, b/w photography © Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher
Bruce Nauman
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
from 5 June 2021
Throughout his career, Nauman has relentlessly challenged the possibilities of what art may be, and directly confronts viewers with their own physical and mental presence. The exhibition is a non-chronological journey through Nauman’s multifaceted oeuvre, and allows visitors to experience his sculptures, neon works, films, video works, sound recordings, text and works on paper, highlighting themes the artist endlessly revisits.
The exhibition is organised by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Tate Modern, London in collaboration with Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan.
Curated by Leontine Coelewij, Curator Contemporary Art Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen, former Curator Contemporary Art Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Andrea Lissoni, former Senior Curator (International Art), Film, Tate Modern, Nicholas Serota, former Director Tate and Katy Wan, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern.
Photo: Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Edith Dekyndt
Active Threads (Group), KAI10 | ARTHENA FOUNDATION, curated by Julia Höner
08.05.2021 - 05.09.2021
The international group exhibition Active Threads at KAI 10 | ARTHENA FOUNDATION inquires into the social and political relevance of textiles today. It explores how textile fabrics still function as extremely effective means of communication, even in our present digital era. The exhibition documents the ways in which fabric and textile techniques can contain political messages, decor can be transformed into radical symbolism, or fabrics can store memories and preserve our material environment. It thus becomes evident in just how many ways textiles can serve as catalysts of societal and cultural processes. In an increasingly virtualised world lacking tactile encounters, the exhibition Active Threads invites us to a diverse sensual experience of the material qualities inherent in art.
KAI 10 | ARTHENA FOUNDATION, Foto: Achim Kukulies
Juergen Staack
Sound and Silence
Der Klang der Stille in der Kunst der Gegenwart
Kunstmuseum Bonn
27.05.2021 - 05.09.2021
Die Ausstellung Sound and Silence widmet sich dem Thema der Stille und des Schweigens im Feld der aktuellen Bildenden Kunst. Die Präsentation wird im Blick auf das Jubiläum des 250. Geburtstags von Ludwig von Beethoven realisiert und nimmt den fortschreitenden Prozess seiner Ertaubung als Ausgangspunkt für die grundsätzliche Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Klang und Stille, der produktiven und zugleich zerstörerischen Kraft des Schweigens und der Unmöglichkeit einer völligen Stille.
Photo: Courtesy the artist
Giuseppe Penone
The Listener
as Special Event of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia
Presented by the Vuslat Foundation
Until 21 November 2021
Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano, courtesy Vuslat Foundation and the artist
Bruce Nauman
Contrapposto Studies
Palazzo Grassi - Punta della Dogana
23.05.2021 - 09.01.2022
The exhibition in Venice is focused on a series of recent video installations that Nauman has developed in the last five years and are related to a single channel video from 1968, “Walk with Contrapposto.” The show includes a comprehensive survey of that series along with a number of earlier performances, installations and videos that provide the overall context for the recent work. From the 1960s to today, Bruce Nauman has constantly experimented with different artistic languages – from photography to performance, sculpture and video – to explore and mine their potentialities in a body of work that relentlessly explores the human condition while interrogating the very definition of what constitutes artistic practice.
Photo: Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Tony Cragg at Houghton Hall
19.05.2021 - 26.09.2021
Major works by Tony Cragg are shown in the grounds and historic interiors of Houghton Hall in Norfolk. The exhibition, curated by the artist himself, includes large-scale bronze and steel sculptures sited in the gardens and grounds, and smaller pieces shown in the State rooms and gallery spaces of the house. Several new works have been made specifically for the exhibition.
Photo: Pete Huggins
Aleana Egan
small field
Künstlerhaus Bremen
08.05.2021 - 18.07.2021
In small field entwirft Aleana Egan ein Setting aus abstrakten Skulpturen, die sich zu vielschichtigen Konstellationen zusammenfügen – Materialien wie Metalle, Holz, Pigmente und Stoffe verweisen auf ihre eigenen Eigenschaften und bleiben dennoch unkonkret: In ihrer Unbestimmtheit lösen die Objekte vielmehr immaterielle Momente aus – Ideen, Gedanken, Gefühle, Stimmungen, Energien und Beziehungen sowohl zueinander als auch zwischenmenschlich, die sich in Formen manifestieren und das Innere nach außen kehren. Latente Anspielungen werden in bildhauerische Gesten übersetzt sichtbar und rücken das Prozesshafte ins Zentrum.
Photo: Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Alice Channer
Sculpture in The City 2021 (Group), City of London, UK
June 2021 - May 2022
The 10th Edition of Sculpture in the City will launch 15 June 2021. Further details will be made available on the website and social media channels in coming weeks.
Participating artists include: Alice Channer, Almuth Tebbenhoff, Bram Ellens, Elisa Artesero, Eva Rothschild, Guillaume Vandame, Isabella Martin, Jake Elwes, Jun T. Lai, Laura Arminda Kingsley, Laure Prouvost, Mark Handforth, Mike Ballard, Oliver Bragg, Regitze Engelsborg Karlsen, Rosanne Robertson, Ruth Ewan, Tatiana Wolska
Photo: Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Alice Channer
Liverpool Biennial 2021: The Stomach and The Port (Group), curated by Manuela Moscoso, Liverpool, UK
19 May - 27 June 2021
Alice Channer presents a series of sculptures and pleated fabric prints at The Lewis’s Building. In the assembled works, Channer mimics a geological process that happens on a massively non-human scale using industrial processes that operate on a human scale – a deliberate conflation of scales and kinds of body. Loosely resembling natural rock formations, such as ammonite fossils, Channer’s large-scale sculptures represent the passing and scale of geological time. Bone-shaped structures, created by the application of multiple distortion, stretching and casting techniques, show strata-like ridges on their surfaces.
Photo: Achim Kukulies
Peter Buggenhout
nicht geheur
Kunstmuseum Reutlingen
01.05.2021 - 12.09.2021
Peter Buggenhout describes his hybrid sculptures as "abject things" that reject any classification, including those as artistic works: found objects, waste and technical but also organic materials such as pig's blood, cow's stomachs and horsehair are joined and worked on until a certain degree of abstraction is achieved, which still tempts identification but at the same time prevents it. Buggenhout's sensual sculptures therefore appear as essential counterparts that are uneasy and odd. For this major exhibition in Reutlingen, the artist produces a new group of works from the "eternal material" that has been wandering through the ages: marble.
Photo: Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
Thomas Ruff
after.images - WORKS 1989-2020
National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
27.03.2021 - 04.07.2021
The exhibition curated by Martin Germann and the show is conceived as a spatial network of museum galleries with five visitor friendly thematic chapters to understand and to read Ruffs practice from various angles, Working in Series: Tableaux chinois, Turning Points in the History of Photography, Astronomy, Genre and Press, in which many of the issues interfere.
Photo: Courtesy the artist, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Paul Czerlitzki
LOSE ENDEN (Group exhibition) at Kunsthalle Bern
27.03.20211 - 16.05.2021
curated by Valérie Knoll and Julia Künzi
The artists brought together in Lose Enden are writing the latest chapters in the history of painting, while not necessarily regarding themselves as painters. In contrast to the practice of preceding generations, their differences are less likely to be expressed in gestures of hesitation and scepticism. Many draw upon an abundance of resources, acutely aware of the formidable conventions with which they are engaging. Faced with the prospect of having to add to the vast system of images, narratives and ideas, they seem to exhibit a remarkable self-confidence. Something has changed. Only ten years ago, painting was being discussed in terms of its capacity to reproduce circuits of social and economic power – networks were detaching it from what it referred to. In Lose Enden, the relationships emerging from beneath the surface appear neither to be restricted to particular networks, nor entirely distinct from others. Notions of this kind, conceived in metaphors of digital complicity, have bottomed out. Relationships tend again to be thought of in isolation from each other, as if people were watching each other at work in their glass studios, rather than actually meeting and exchanging ideas.
Photo: Achim Kukulies
Thomas Schütte
Skizzen zum Projekt Großes Theater
Skulpturenhalle Neuss
30.04.2021 - 01.08.2021
Photo: Luise Heuter, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021
Hanne Darboven
Der Regenmacher
MKM MUSEUM KÜPPERSMÜHLE FÜR MODERNE KUNST DUISBURG
+++ VIRTUELL ERÖFFNET +++
Hanne Darboven, who described herself as a writer and composer, is one of the most important artists of the 21st century. At the center of her work is the writing and making visible of time as a way of experiencing and coping with reality. "My work is a recording in the sense of being there, it is working through," Darboven formulated as early as 1966 and throughout her life developed her very own contribution to Conceptual Art and Minimal Art. Until her death in 2009, the artist lived and worked in seclusion in Hamburg in a studio that resembled a Wunderkammer.
The MKM is showing four large work cycles from the Ströher Collection, comprising around 2,000 individual works. They are exemplary for Hanne Darboven's thinking and work and are complemented by biographical insights. The central work Der Regenmacher (The Rainmaker, 1985) is on view for the first time after 20 years in its entirety with all 1,386 sheets.
Mario Merz
at Dia:Beacon
Riggio Galleries, Beacon, New York
long-term exhibition
Dia Art Foundation presents a long-term exhibition of work by Mario Merz, opening fall 2020, at Dia Beacon in Beacon, New York. Featuring recent acquisitions, the exhibition includes Teatro cavallo (Horse Theater, 1967) and Tavola spirale (Spiral Table, 1982) alongside historical loans from collections in the United States and the Fondazione Merz in Turin. Using recycled organic and industrial materials, the artist developed a highly imaginative iconography and recast timeless forms, such as the igloo and table, in installations that envision the interdependency of individuals, society, and the natural environment. Spanning the late 1950s through the mid-1980s, the exhibition revisits Merz’s key forms and motifs, distinctive use of neon, and deployment of the Fibonacci sequence—where each number equals the sum of the two that precede it—for the structure of his installations. This will be his first solo institutional presentation in the United States in years.
Paloma Varga Weisz
19.05.2021 - 20.06.2021
Le Consortium
Curated by Eric Troncy
Erected in the Consortium Museum’s “White Box,” Glory Hole takes the shape of a large-scale rustic cabin, in which the roughly-assembled boards made of dark wood let slip through a few rays of light emanating from the inside. The artwork, which was shown for the first time in 2015 at the Salzburg Kunstverein (Austria) and presented more recently at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht (Netherlands, 2019), is inspired by the artist’s research in the Austrian countryside, where the cabin was collected and later transported to its subsequent exhibition spaces.
Impressive yet impenetrable, the installation is activated by the visitors’ curiosity. To discover
its contents, viewers are invited to approach
the structure and look inside through its various suggestive apertures—gaps in construction, and the glory holes intended for that exact purpose.
Through the viewers’ inquisitive eyes, two dimly
lit rooms are revealed, featuring several wholly fabricated characters. Two human-size puppets, reduced to mechanical sexual gestures, are animated by cables hanging from the ceiling. With a face distorted by a prominent penis, agitated by repetitive jerks, one of the sculptures embodies a ludicrous, exacerbated virility. The presence of two taxidermy monkeys adds to the absurdity of this mise-en-scène.
Wolfgang Plöger
. [edit]
Japanisches Palais, Dresden
14.11.2020 - 22.02.2021
curated by Björn Egging and AdA Archiv der Avantgarden
For his upcoming solo exhibition Wolfgang Plöger kindly asks for your support in sending him test prints from your own printers.
As a thank-you all participants will receive a copy of a dirt print edition.
Charlotte Posenenske: Work In Progress
MUDAM Luxembourg
10.10.2020 – 10.01.2021
Kuratoren:
Jessica Morgan und Alexis Lowry
Die Ausstellungspräsentation im Mudam wird kuratiert von Clément Minighetti
Assistiert von Sarah Beaumont
Die Ausstellung Charlotte Posenenske: Work in Progress wird organisiert von der Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, New York, in Zusammenarbeit mit dem MACBA in Barcelona, der Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf und dem Mudam Luxemburg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean.
Bruce Nauman
Tate, London
07.10.2020 - 21.02.2021
Bruce Nauman is a restlessly inventive artist. Since the late 1960s he has continually tested what an artwork can be, by reshaping old forms and creating new ones. His ground-breaking works using sound, film, video and neon have influenced generations of artists.
This is the first major exhibition of his work in London in more than 20 years. It allows visitors to engage with the artist’s universe through immersive installations with a strong emphasis on sound and moving image, as well as poetic sculptures and neon pieces.
Major works like Double Steel Cage Piece 1974, Anthro/Socio (Rinde Spinning) and Clown Torture 1987 highlights Nauman’s distinctive preoccupations and how he incessantly revisits them – yet never repeats himself.
Exhibition organised by Tate Modern and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in collaboration with Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan
Photo: Helge Mundt, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020
Group Exhibition "Wände / Walls"
Kunstmuseum Stuttgart
26.09.2020 – 31.01.2021
u.a. Daniel Buren, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Charlotte Posenenske, Thomas Schütte, Lawrence Weiner
The exhibition WÄNDE I WALLS brings together works from 1966 to today, in which the spatial boundary of the wall is thematized on various levels of meaning. In their works, artists such as Monica Bonvicini and Yoko Ono highlight the most fundamental function of walls—that of inclusion and exclusion. On the one hand, walls stand for the protection of the individual, while on the other hand they can confine and deny access. As a space-creating architectural element, they help to determine our living spaces and are involved in identity-forming processes. Artists such as Ernst Caramelle and Bruce Nauman visualize this by understanding the wall as a reacting counterpart or by giving it human characteristics. In turn, works by Jeewi Lee and Sol LeWitt, among others, address the so-called white cube as a common form of presentation of modern and contemporary art. They demonstrate how the white walls of the exhibition space influence the effect and perception of art.
Thomas Ruff
K20
Düsseldorf
12.09.2020 - 07.02.2021
Thomas Ruff (*1958) is one of the most internationally significant artists of his generation. Already as a student of the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the early 1980s, he chose a conceptual approach to photography. His work, which explores a wide variety of genres and historical varieties of photography, represents one of the most versatile and surprising positions within contemporary art. The extensive exhibition at K20 focuses on image series from two decades in which the artist hardly ever picked up a camera himself. Instead, he used existing photographic material from a wide variety of sources for his often large-format images.
Bruce Nauman
Modelle
Skulpturenhalle Neuss
04.09.2020 – 13.12.2020
curated by Dieter Schwarz
Bruce Nauman thinks in models - in the form of possibility - and therefore drawing takes on a central function in his work and in this exhibition. Drawings illustrate the essential, they refer to the conceivable. Drawing as well as models are stylistically unbound and open up spaces for the imagination.
Gregor Schneider
Kreuzweg
WAY OF THE CROSS
2020 (Based on an idea for Berlin in 2006)
Plaza del Mercado, Logroño, Spain
Gregor Schneider’s installation Kreuzweg (Way of the Cross), currently on display at St. Mathhews Church in Berlin, is a dark black passageway in the shape of a cross. The cross-shaped structure has four openings, one in each of its ends, through which the viewer can enter and exit. The shape of the cross is fully obtainable only from an aerial, God-like point of view. Upon entering the passageway, the viewer loses the formal contour of the structure, as the contour of his/her own body becomes blurred, melting into the indefinite blackness surrounding it, in which the distinction between one’s own outer/physical and inner/psychological space is no longer clear.
Gregor Schneider
Tote Räume / Dead Spaces
West Den Haag (former American Embassy), Den Haag, Netherlands
Curator: Marie-José Sondeijker
29.08. - 06.12.2020
West Den Haag is thrilled to announce Tote Räume, Gregor Schneider‘s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands. Acknowledged as a groundbreaking artistic proposition, Schneider’s work can be regarded also as prophetic in a time of mandatory social distancing since it is based on mechanisms of physical isolation. Unfolding a sequence of rooms, sculptures, human figures, photos and videos spanning four decades of radical art making, the exhibition is arranged in response to, and exchange with, the original function of its building as the U.S. Embassy in the Netherlands from 1959 until 2018.
Daniel Buren
Illuminare lo spazio, lavori in situ e situati
GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo
09.07. - 01.11.2020
The exhibition curated by Lorenzo Giusti will gather a selection of the new fiber optic works created by the artist. Luminous fabrics, in which the geometric motifs characteristic of the artist's research alternate, will inhabit the central space of the room, creating a path of great visual intensity, capable of renewing the surrounding environment by activating an unprecedented dialogue with the paintings and ancient frescoes on the walls. Presented for the first time in Italy, Buren's fiber optic works are the most advanced result of an artistic research carried out for over fifty years.
Paloma Varga Weisz: Bumped Body
at Henry Moore Institure, Leeds
13.03.20 - 03.01.2021
Spanning over twenty years, work from throughout her career is on display. The exhibition features a diverse cast of characters; from early works such as Wilde Leute (Wild Bunch), a series of ceramics that take the form of fantastical creatures, to later pieces such as Beulenmann (Bumpman) and the fragmented body of Waldfrau (Women of the Forest).
The exhibition also includes over forty of her watercolours and drawings which present a world of masquerades, disguises and role reversals. Paloma Varga Weisz’s starting point for this poetic and narrative work is often her own life experiences, yet it also reflects wider themes of identity, societal ‘norms’ and historical stereotyping.
Growing up in Germany, her artist father was a major influence on her future artistic career. She was classically trained, learning woodcarving and modelling in Bavaria, before studying in Düsseldorf, where she lives and works today.
Cristina Iglesias
Royal Academy Architecture Prize 2020
For three years, the Royal Academy Architecture Prize has been awarded to an individual whose work inspires and instructs the discussion, collection or production of architecture in the broadest sense.
Cristina Iglesias invites us to look, not just at buildings, but at the spaces between them.
With cities home to more and more people, generous public space is increasingly necessary for reflection and respite. Iglesias’s works exist in dialogue with the buildings around them, but go further in inviting their audiences – city dwellers – to contemplate their surroundings through the introduction of running water and naturalistic imagery reminiscent of fallen leaves.