Gregor Schneider
Deadlock
Opening:
Thursday, 27 October 2011, 20:00 p.m.
Curator:
Veit Loers
CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo
Av. Constitución, 23
28931 Móstoles,
Madrid, Spain
Tuesday–Sunday 11:00–21:00 hrs.
Closed on Monday
At the CA2M, Schneider will conduct a thematic exploration of how a traditional house in the town of Móstoles was transformed into the modern museum we see today. Visitors will practically be sucked into a vast labyrinth of pipes extending throughout the entire centre without having stepped foot inside. The idea of the rooms is transferred to hallways and corridors, taking visitors into unusual spatial complexes, rooms from House ur and spaces from other projects. As in all of Gregor Schneider’s works, it will seem as though the complex had been there from the very beginning. Likewise CA2M will present film projections and photographs of the Totes Haus ur and other projects of the artist.
The piece he presented at the German Pavilion in 2001 at the 49th Venice Biennale, entitled Totes Haus ur [Dead House ur], travelled around the world and was awarded the Golden Lion. The Totes Haus ur, an old tenement house, is located in Rheydt, a borough south of the city of Mönchengladbach in the Lower Rhine region (near Düsseldorf and Cologne). Gregor Schneider was born there in 1969 and still lives and works there today. In 1985 he began to fill the building with a series of rooms that lent it an air of mystery. By doubling the number of walls and windows and adding new spaces, he eliminated the rooms’ original function and created new places, in part with the corresponding furniture. He then assigned familiar functions to these new, alien spaces: for Gregor Schneider, the living room, bedroom, storage room, kitchen, hallway, guest room and basement do not represent environments but spaces delimited by walls whose functions have been predetermined for generations, membranes behind which disturbing things can happen (Ulrich Loock, 1995). Through his artistic intervention, Schneider gives them a new image, in which the concept of death is implied by concepts such as the mould or the replica. However familiar they may seem, Schneider’s rooms are spatial creations as unreal as they are mysterious. Like the found footage used in video art, Gregor Schneider’s rooms are copied, so to speak, from the real world and transferred to the fictional reality of art. This could explain why Gregor Schneider’s name appeared in international press headlines in 2008, when he presented his idea (as yet unrealised) of exhibiting a room with a dying patient inside.
Since 1997, when the artist began sending the rooms of his Totes Haus ur to exhibitions and selling them to collections, Schneider has developed new spatial ideas for outdoor contexts, such as the street section he showed at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hannelore Reuen, 2003), the “Schneider family’s” two semi-detached homes at Artangel in London (2004), the cube imitating the Kaaba designed for St. Mark’s Square in Venice, where it was vetoed, although it was eventually displayed at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 2007, and the Weisse Folter (White Torture) series at the K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf (2007). That same year, Schneider also produced the 21 cells for Bondi Beach, on the east coast of Australia, and in 2008 he presented his project entitled END at the Städtischen Museum Mönchengladbach. More recently, in September 2011 Gregor Schneider built an Indian version of the Totes Haus ur for the Durga Puja Festival in Kolkata. Also in November 2011, the artist will be opening a new project called “Sterberaum”, at Kunstraum Innsbruk, Austria.
A bilingual exhibition catalogue will be published, featuring texts by Veit Loers, Ulrich Loock, David Moriente and Ory Dessau, as well as extensive graphic documentation of the installation. The catalogue will be the first Spanish publication ever dedicated to this artist.
