previews January 1998

Andrea Fraser

One of the first things a visitor to the Sprengel Museum encounters are signs explaining the history of the institution and its collection. In her large-scale project, Andrea Fraser changes all that—sort of. Installing video and display boards, she’ll inform visitors about the museum’s meaning and evolution in her signature deadpan fashion. For the project, curated by the Sprengel’s Dietmar Elger, she’s sifted through documents pertaining to the history of the institution, and her video features appearances by the museum’s director, the cultural commissioner for Hannover, and a government official

previews January 1998

Pipilotti Rist

Few other young Swiss artists are in as much demand internationally as Pipilotti Rist. Most recently she's been invited to guest-edit an issue of the prestigious cultural magazine du and even named artistic director of “Expo Schweiz 2001.” Britta Schmitz, chief curator of the Hamburger Bahnhof, has arranged for Rist's first solo show in Germany, a site-specific room-size installation titled Remake of the Weekend. Earlier works by the artist, including Ever is Over All, her much discussed contribution to the 1997 Venice Biennale, will also be presented as part of the institution's permanent

print January 1998

Jochen Klein

The first solo exhibition of work by Jochen Klein—an artist who died last summer from AIDS-related causes—was especially tragic because of the great promise it revealed. Klein was only thirty at the time of his death. After studying at the Munich Academy of Art, he traveled to New York, where he became a member of Group Material. This was not the first time he took a theoretical approach to artmaking: in Munich he had participated in group exhibitions at the Munich Kunstverein dealing with utopian design and gender. Together with Thomas Eggerer (with whom he collaborated on theoretical texts),

print December 1997

Heimo Zobernig

With its limited colors and forms, Heimo Zobernig’s installation Ein Fernsehstudio für UTV (A television studio for UTV, 1997) could be read in part as an ironic commentary on Minimalism. A painting with broad stripes also hinted at Zobernig’s interest in color theory, but in the context of the installation, it became a test pattern on a television screen. The colors of the stripes (white, yellow, dark blue, green, dark red, medium red, blue, and black) reappeared on eight monochrome Styrofoam rectangular blocks that were strewn around the space. While Zobernig intended the blocks to serve as

print November 1997

Joep van Lieshout

One could find everything needed to live—or at least survive—in Joep van Lieshout’s recent exhibition. The artist had filled the museum’s oblong space with a long series of objects that incorporated various household items, including everything from kitchen appliances (even one intended to be used in pig-butchering, along with dried sausages) to a water closet.

At first glance, one might assume that van Lieshout’s new works are merely symptoms of the current vogue for “furniture art.” His counters, bathtubs, and cabinets, his built-in sleep and work stations, are at once aestheticized and

previews September 1997

Komar & Melamid

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid first captured public attention through their large-scale installations dealing with the history of Russia and send-ups of Socialist Realist painting. For the past few years the pair has been carrying out poker-faced surveys of aesthetic likes and dislikes, statistically sorted by age, gender, income level, and profession, in an attempt to suss out the kind of art the public loves best and hates most. In an exhibition curated by Evelyn Weiss, the images the pair have created from survey data in thirteen countries around the globe—including the USA, Russia,

previews September 1997

Follow Me

Along the route between the German towns of Buxtehude and Cuxhaven, billboards by Douglas Gordon, Gillian Wearing, Jane and Louise Wilson, and others will direct motorists to concurrent shows of British art this fall. Kunstverein Hannover director Eckhard Schneider’s project brings British art to some unusual venues: on the shore of the North Sea (Antony Gormley at the Niedersächsisches Wattenmeer National Park), aboard a former freighter (Anish Kapoor at Stade Kunstverein), and stuck in the spokes of a mill (Mark Quinn at the Kunstverein Kehdingen). Other artists participating are Alan Charlton,

previews September 1997

Deutschlandbilder

Blockbuster shows seem to be the rage in Berlin these days, and Eckhart Gillen’s survey of 400 works by almost eighty German artists from 1933 to the present is no exception. In a first for a show of this size, Gillen presents artists from the former West Germany alongside those from the DDR (including Gerhard Altenbourg, Bernhard Heisig, and Werner Tübke, who went their own way, the curator argues, despite the official line). One highlight: the first public hanging of the works from René Block’s celebrated collection, donated in 1967 to a planned museum in the Czech city of Lidice but consigned

print Summer 1997

Jürgen Drescher

While he was a student during the early ’80s, Jürgen Drescher collaborated with Reinhard Mucha on the creation of a temporary bar in the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. This work, which served as a meeting place for students, was both an artistic intervention and a functioning bar. Drescher and Mucha later revisited this idea with Modell. Konrad Fischers Bar, 1981, a piece with an even stronger sculptural character.

Like the Düsseldorf bar-project, Drescher’s recent installation, entitled Ich nehme mit einem eigenen Raum am Rheinischen Karneval teil (I participate with my own space in the Rhenish

print May 1997

Markus Oehlen

Markus Oehlen has somewhat ironically characterized his paintings as “Informal Pop,” and this phrase sums up one’s initial impression of the work: bright colors in multiple layers and apparently hasty gestures combine to create an almost psychedelic effect. The paintings are not quite what they seem, however; on closer examination, one realizes that their apparent spontaneity is the result of an elaborate process.

Oehlen creates linoleum cuts and then projects the patterns onto the canvas, drawing the projected shapes with meticulous care, adding still more and more layers, using felt-tip pens

print January 1997

OPENINGS: TOBIAS REHBERGER

TOBIAS REHBERGER IS NO LONGER a secret in his native Germany. The thirty-year-old artist, whose frequently collaborative output includes drawings, paintings, and sculpture as well as installations consisting of handmade, everyday objects that evoke groovy ’60s and ’70s furnishings, has already appeared in numerous museum and Kunstverein shows. He’s contributed to exhibitions like “Backstage” and “Manifesta I” (for which he sent identically clad club kids wandering throughout the Rotterdam show’s various sites) and will appear in the upcoming “Skulpturenprojekte Münster” (his initial proposal to

previews January 1997

“Renzo Piano Building Workshop”

“Interactive” is the key word in this presentation of eight of Renzo Piano’s high-tech projects. Curator Giulio Macchi has illustrated the genesis of the works with models, blueprints, material samples, and films, and visitors can explore particular aspects of these simulated work sites (from the architect’s use of materials or light to integration into nature) through books, computers, CD-ROMS, and CAD programs. Internet hookups with the Office of Architects in Genoa allow viewers to send specific queries to Piano himself, and current construction sites in Berlin,

Yilmaz Dziewior