print March 2001

Jitka Hanslová

JITKA HANZLOVÅ was born in what was then Czechoslovakia and emigrated to Germany, where she studied photography. While still a student in Essen, she began to travel regularly to Rokytník, the northern Bohemian village where she grew up, photographing old friends and acquaintances and producing a series that she named after the village, 1990–94. Next, Hanzlová devoted herself to the place where she was now living: a housing project in Essen that was built for working-class families in this industrial area. Hanzlová walked around the place with her camera and photographed her neighbor. These

print February 2001

Günter Umberg

How is color to be applied to a surface? Günter Umberg, an artist living in Cologne, has been asking that question for thirty years now. In the process he has concentrated on a single color, black, with occasional forays into others. Until about 1978, Umberg mixed his pigment with damar resin before applying it layer by layer to a wood panel, sanding each layer before applying the next. To achieve even greater depth, he then changed his painting method. Today he brushes the dry pigment directly into a moist layer of damar previously applied to the panel, often mixing other colors into the base

print October 2000

Kasmir Malevich

WHY DID KASIMIR MALEVICH, whose name has become the very embodiment of abstract painting, end his life's work with figure paintings and portraits that strike admirers of Suprematism with pure horror? Why this treason against the square? Not even this exhibition of works from the collection of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, the largest show to date of Malevich's late period, can offer an answer. But what if it was not treason at all? What if this development was inherent in the painter's work from the very beginning?

The exhibition contained many depictions of peasants, whom Malevich

print April 2000

Korpys/Löffler

A dead man, a soldier, is lying on the floor. He’s on his back, his legs outstretched. A brown branch that appears to originate from an unusual plant is boring its way through his head. It’s like an old horror film: brutal, but also harmless and artificial. Both man and tree are made of the cheap foam material used in the building trade for sealing joints. They’ve been spray painted: the man green, the tree dark brown.

On a monitor sitting on the floor in a far corner of the room behind the corpse a video is playing. There are buildings set in a green landscape. They are under construction—or

print February 2000

Christian Jankowski

Christian Jankowski came to international attention with his innovative, intelligent, and funny video installation Telemistica, 1999, at the last Venice Biennale. But until now, there has been little opportunity to see his work in his native Germany. And so Udo Kittelmann, the director of the Kunstverein in Cologne, decided to present the Venice installation.

Telemistica shows the responses of five Italian fortune-tellers whom Jankowski called during their television programs to consult about the success or failure of his upcoming participation in the Biennale. They ask him about his type of

previews January 2000

Gregor Schneider: Cellar

For the last fifteen years, Gregor Schneider has been frantically “redoing” the interior of his little house in Rheydt, not far from Düsseldorf. Occasionally he rips out a few rooms and sends them off to a museum. For this show in Vienna, organized by Secession president Matthias Herrmann, he’s duplicating, stone for stone, what he calls “the last hole”—his cellar, here a grotto-like cave. As always, the thirty-year-old artist affords a glimpse into his home—a structure ordinary enough from the outside, but filled with fantastical corridors and uncanny spaces—and offers a view onto everyday life

print September 1999

Tobias Rehberger

The objects exhibited in “Fragments of their pleasant spaces (in my fashionable version)” have a peculiar provenance. Tobias Rehberger asked five friends for a description of a “comfortable niche”; then, taking their responses, he created five groups of furniture, painstakingly executed, including a seemingly Arp-inspired seating area and a wood stand that facilitates watching the news on TV while cooking, titled Cutting, preparing, without missing anything, and being happy about what comes next (all works 1999). Another piece, a wide, cushioned platform set on a carpet with a side table sporting

print February 1999

Monika Baer

Those who know Monika Baer’s early paintings might be struck momentarily speechless by the artist’s recent work. Her large new canvases feature eyes and mouths, sketched in pink, swimming on a white ground. Some of the eyes gaze at the viewer; others look up, glance to the side, or are closed. The lashes are finely rendered, the shadows around the eyelids painted with delicate precision. They lend the eyes a sculpted, even plastic appearance, allowing them to bulge almost monstrously from the canvas. In some of the pictures, the mouth is closed and only barely hinted at. When it is shown open,

print October 1998

Franz Erhard Walther

For about thirty years the Hamburg-based artist Franz Erhard Walther has pursued—with admirable persistence—an elusive approach to artmaking that he calls “another concept of the work of art.” Over the years Walther’s innovative projects have often suffered from critical neglect, but three comprehensive retrospective exhibitions in Cologne and Hannover recently provided a long-overdue opportunity to reevaluate his career.

While he was still an art student, Walther began to take a radical approach to sculpture, choosing to return to a ground-zero point at which the only materials that remained

print May 1998

Carl Ostendarp

In recent years narrative has been finding its way back into contemporary art via installation, video, photography, and even painting. The New York–based painter Carl Ostendarp, for example, encourages narrative readings of his canvases. In Dead on it, 1997, one of the works in his recent show, a wavy brown line divides the painting into tan and white sections. Above the line floats a solid brown balloon resembling those in comic strips. It contains no words or letters, though, so it could simply be an abstract form or a stylized body part—a stomach, perhaps, or a breast with a large nipple. In

print September 1997

Ralf Berger

At first glance the gallery space seemed devoid of art objects, although you could hear an irritating, ear-numbing drilling sound. Turning to find the source of the din, however, you discovered a video monitor hanging below the ceiling. On its screen appeared an image of a jackhammer’s revolving shaft, thundering and shuddering as it sank into a concrete floor; hands, straining to hold the drill, appeared in close-up. Eventually it became apparent that the jackhammer was boring into the floor of the same gallery space, and that the actual floor was riddled with perforations.

Ralf Berger has said,

print May 1997

Judith Samen

The aesthetic of the Düsseldorf school of photography is by now a familiar one: distanced, straightforward shots of people, landscapes, cities, and museum interiors, subjects often photographed with such objective detachment that it can take a considered effort to determine whether the work is by Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, or Candida Höfer. Although Judith Samen grew up in the Ruhrgebiet and studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, her photographs manifest a completely different style.

As Samen freely admits, it is not the medium of photography itself that interests her: rather

Noemi Smolik