print September 1999

Johannes Wohnseifer

To get to Johannes Wohnseifer’s recent exhibition, which was curated by Rita Kersting and housed in the project room of the Museum Ludwig Köln, one had to pass through the permanent collection; in the middle of Pop Art, one came up against a white nylon curtain on which “MUSEUM” was written in huge black type. Pushing the curtain aside, one entered a large room only to stop at the sight of sixteen square wood panels laid across the floor (each approximately 6.5 by 6.5 feet) and painted in colorful monochromes. The luminosity of the panels initially caused even the Carl Andre–seasoned visitor to

print Summer 1999

Stephen Prina

On entering Stephen Prina’s recent exhibition, one was greeted by a monochromatic gray wall, on which the artist’s name and the title of the show had been applied at right angles to one another in large yellow letters. Mounted at the point where both met—as if it were part of a store’s product display—was a new CD, his first, titled (like the exhibition itself) “Push Comes to Love.” On a wall nearby hung a red monochrome painting, Push Comes to Love: Vivid Rose (all works 1999). This entry area, with its subtle resonances among gray, yellow, and red, created a minimal atmosphere characteristic

previews May 1999

Dorothee Golz

Success is still relatively new to thirty-nine-year-old Dorothee Golz. Things really began to happen for her in 1997, when Catherine David invited the artist to exhibit in Documenta X (where she showed Hohlwelt, 1996, a large, transparent plastic bubble). Two years down the road, Udo Kittelmann, director of the Kölnischer Kunstverein, is mounting Golz's first big solo. The exhibition brings together fifty drawings (in which the utopian and the everyday are united in humorous—and often unsettling—shapes) and three large sculptures, whose formal vocabulary borrows freely from '50s

previews May 1999

“Michael Buthe: Early Drawings and Diaries”

Until just before his death in 1994, Michael Buthe constantly shuttled between Cologne and Marrakech, and his very personal, narratively charged works garnered invitations to Documenta in 1972 and again in 1992. Although Buthe, who made vast installations, paintings, and drawings, was a central figure in German art of the '70s and '80s and exercised great influence as a teacher, this exhibition is the first large solo show of his work since his death. Here the Kunsthalle's Hans-Michael Herzog presents roughly '100 works on paper from the late '60s through 1980 together with several sketchbooks

print April 1999

OPENINGS: MANFRED PERNICE

One chestnut of modernist architecture has been the gradual transformation of the role of the window. Once simply a source of light and a framed view of the external world, in the International Style skyscraper the window has become a semi-transparent membrane and an allover surface. Whatever view is afforded from inside to out, a reciprocal perspective isn’t guaranteed. The architectural ambivalence of such spatial boundaries is a recurrent theme in the crude sculptural models of Manfred Pernice. Comparable to architect Jean Nouvel’s facades, in which walls become screens onto which constantly

print April 1999

Jonathan Meese

Immediately following his first solo exhibition—a crowded installation in which walls, floors, and even ceilings were strewn with photocopies, handwritten notes, film posters, album covers, and the ripped-out pages of books—Jonathan Meese, who was born in Tokyo in 1972 and now lives in Hamburg and Berlin, was invited to participate in the 1998 Berlin Biennale. On that occasion, he offered a slightly different version of his original piece, filling a large space with another “allover” installation. For the length of its run, the artist spent a lot of time at the exhibition—casually talking or

print March 1999

Candice Breitz

Candice Breitz’s first works to cause a sensation were the photos in her “Ghost” series, 1996, in which she took generic South African postcards featuring staged shots of half-naked African women in traditional costume and then painted over the women’s skin with correction fluid. For the “Rainbow” series, 1996, she made collages in which she combined images (clipped out of porno magazines) of the body parts of white women with those of African women in native dress. In works like these, Breitz, who was born in Johannesburg in 1972, addresses themes of racial discrimination, sexism, and the exotic

print January 1999

Nicolaus Schafhausen

Nicolaus Schafhausen only officially takes over at the FRANKFURTER KUNSTVEREIN this month, but he’s already off to a running start. In September, the thirty-three-year-old former director of the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart organized “Starter,” a night of performances, readings, videos, and concerts by artists including Jonathan Meese, Liam Gillick, Daniel Pflumm, and Stephen Prina. He followed that event up with “User-surface City,” which brought artists, designers, urbanists, and art theorists to the recently renovated building for a series of lectures. It’s an interdisciplinary, theoretically

print January 1999

Christian Philipp Müller

Christian Philipp Müller’s recent exhibition, “Imagetransfer,” offered a manifold consideration of “place,” addressing Cologne’s status as a city of culture, issues of cultural sponsorship, and the often freighted relationship between economic and cultural activities. The show consisted principally of two installations featuring framed drawings, file folders, and high, white plinths that could stand alone as Minimalist sculpture.

In both works, the drawings were hung in a grid formation on a wall in front of which Müller posed one of the white podiumlike stands. Two campaigns produced by the

previews January 1999

Richard Long

Kunstverein director Eckhard Schneider, known for championing contemporary British art, now presents a forty-piece survey of fifty-three-year-old Richard Long’s career, including his very latest work. Long’s engagement with disparate media takes center stage as sculptures, text works, photographs, and murals are exhibited side by side. Given the artist’s long-standing interest in natural phenomena, it is no surprise that Long produced a 100-meter, site-specific work for Hannover’s light-flooded Orangerie. The catalogue, with a preface by the curator, takes the form of an artist’s book, the

previews January 1999

Marcel Odenbach

Only after receiving institutional recognition in the US did Marcel Odenbach’s work start getting the attention it deserves in Germany. Now the artist’s hometown museum is honoring him with a large-scale exhibition. For this overdue show, a new piece, one of Odenbach’s most ambitious projects to date, is slated to fill the entire Kunstverein. Consisting of four large video projections, the installation addresses the artist’s own youth and the catalysts of his politicization (especially the slaying of student activist Benno Ohnesorg by the West German police, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights

print December 1998

Mike Kelley

Directly inside the entrance to the gallery in Mike Kelley’s recent show, one stumbled on The Keep (all works 1998), a trashy, scrap-wood hut issuing hollow “UFO sounds.” Its interior, visible through various slits, chicken wire, and a small spyglass, featured rows of glass containers drenched in colored light.

Kelley is frequently preoccupied with how authority, particularly schools, affects individuals; his earlier piece Educational Complex, 1995, reflected the constrictive influence of his own art teacher. Like that work, the large installation Sublevel, which lent its name to this show, is

Yilmaz Dziewior