Curated by Rein Wolfs

Recuperated from the debacle at Mass MoCA last year, Maximalist bad boy Christoph Büchel brings his sedimentary dystopias to Kassel for newly appointed curator Rein Wolfs’s first exhibition at the Fridericianum. The Swiss artist’s immersive environment, Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar), attempts to address no less than the history, society, and politics of Germany; befitting such grand ambitions, Büchel will engage the entirety of the kunsthalle’s exhibition space (though the show has been “pared down” to a mere five large-scale, interrelated installations). The Gesamtkunstwerk takes its title from a Romantic-era tome by Jacob Grimm, the elder of the fairy-tale brothers, who was a librarian at the Fridericianum in the 1820s and an ardent German nationalist. Büchel’s critical reinscription of Grimm’s philological project inaugurates a program by Wolfs exploring what he calls new “forms of humanity.”

— Judith Rodenbeck