Curated by Susanne Küper

Given that Düsseldorf was the site of Blinky Palermo's artistic formation in the 1960s—where he not only worked with mentor Joseph Beuys and fellow student and collaborator Gerhard Richter but also lived for many productive years—it is odd that this will be the first major presentation of the artist's work in the city. Organized by two local institutions—the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen—this exhibition of some forty-five works takes the artist's relationship to the city as its premise, giving special emphasis to his preoccupation with the architecture of the local kunsthalle (where the exhibition takes place). The rationale for this narrow focus lies in anecdotes of Palermo's fascination with the washed concrete building on Grabbeplatz which Küper came across while researching her doctoral thesis on Palermo's lost architectural interventions.

— Jaleh Mansoor

Curated by Julian Heynen and Willem de Rooij

Dutch duo de Rijke/de Rooij (sadly divided by the untimely death of Jeroen de Rijke last year) gained acclaim for their 16- and 35-mm films—intensely concentrated studies of landscapes, interiors, and human interactions, as crystalline in their focus as they are nearly static in their presentation. These decisively non-narrative films, which might take a church interior, a graveyard, or a nineteenth-century carpet as their putative subject matter, offer slow-mo reflections on the role of filmic and photographic images in contemporary culture. Along with some photographs and slides, this exhibition showcases four of the artists' films including their celebrated Mandarin Ducks, 2005. A catalogue whose contributors include de Rooij and Juliane Rebentisch accompanies both this show and a related exhibition opening next year at the Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, in Italy.

— Pamela M. Lee