Gregor Schneider: Fotografie und Skulptur
at Sadie Coles HQ, London (2010)
(Press release)
Fotografie und Skulptur
01 September – 02 October 2010
69 South Audley St London W1
Gregor Schneider’s first solo exhibition at a London gallery for thirteen years presents key photography and sculpture from the last decade. Gregor Schneider came to international prominence with Haus u r/Totes Haus u r in Rheydt (now a province of Mönchengladbach), a suburban German house which he has continually reconfigured and duplicated since 1985, in an ongoing project amounting to a "total work of art" or gesamtkunstwerk. Using machines, Schneider shifts walls, ceilings and entire rooms, to create an onion-like layering of shifting spaces whose original arrangement is progressively effaced. The artist has built rooms within rooms that precisely replicate one another; and parts of the house have also been doubled on a 1:1 scale and transposed into different locations. From the start of the project, Schneider has methodically photographed each room of Haus u r, and has also produced a series of photographs of the dark interstices between the rooms.
Since Gregor Schneider’s earliest museum exhibitions in Museum Haus Lange (1994) and Kunsthalle Bern (1996), he has exhibited photographs as independent artworks, commenting that "The photographs and videos are essences, freezing everything." This exhibition focuses on both his photographs and sculptures as "essences" of his art. The photographs relate to projects including Cube Hamburg (2007) a monumental black cube reminiscent of Mecca’s Kaaba outside the Hamburger Kunsthalle, as part of the museum’s Homage to Malevich exhibition in celebration of that artist’s 1915 work Black Square. Schneider’s original unrealised proposal for an equivalent cube in St Mark’s Square, Venice, is also documented. End (2008), an architectural intervention at the Museum Abteiberg, Möchengladbach, Germany, consisted of a vast black portal receding into a blind passageway.
In a blacked-out room downstairs, visitors will encounter a tableau of spot-lit sculptures of human bodies. These half-concealed, supine figures form an enigmatic group of "family members"— Hannelore Reuen, N.Schmidt, "the son"— and suggest the aftermath of some violent crime, as well as calling to mind Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated installation Etant Donnés (1946-66). At first glance, it is unclear whether we have been presented with models or real human bodies, an ambiguity that pervades much of Gregor Schneider’s work: for instance, N.Schmidt, Kabinett für aktuelle Kunst Bremerhaven (2001; now part of the collection of the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt) consists of a room in which a pair of legs protrudes morbidly from behind a wall.
Gregor Schneider at Sadie Coles HQ: 1 | 2
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