Manfred Pernice
Que-Sah
25 April – 6 July 2008
Neues Museum
State Museum for Art and Design in Nuremberg
Klarissenplatz
90402 Nuremberg, Germany
Tue-Fri 10am-8pm, Sat+Sun 10am-6pm
Phone: +49 911 240 20 0 / 69
Fax: +49 911 240 20 29
info [at] nmn.de
The Neues Museum in Nuremberg presents the most comprehensive exhibition to date of work by Berlin-based artist Manfred Pernice.
With his installation-based work, Manfred Pernice (born 1963) belongs to a new generation of German artists who have established international reputations. His sculptures are constructed from conventional building materials such as particle board, blockboard, iron rods and concrete. The formal vocabulary of Pernice’s works often consists of details of real architecture, ranging from tile-covered surfaces and closed structural forms to very specific architectural design solutions such as the Fiat car factory in Turin with its rooftop test track. Functional components such as containers, walled enclosures, mounts or supports also serve as models for his sculptural objects. Pernice often combines these architecturally oriented works with pieces of furniture, models, drawings, photographs or texts to create expansive and evocative installations.
For his exhibition at the Neues Museum in Nuremberg, Manfred Pernice is placing existing and new works in relation to one another. This will include extending his work Fiat and creating an accompanying walk-through architectural space within the exhibition. He also plans to show Zweite Hand, a group of prism-faced towers that evolved from a waiting room setting and are concerned with the viewing aspects of three-dimensional artworks as a fundamental sculptural issue. Pernice is creating a separate special exhibition area, installing his Rückriem/Böll – Peilung, staging a Dosentreff of columnar sculptures and erecting a structure that will extend from floor to ceiling. His mode of presenting these works will also reflect the function and architecture of the Neues Museum in Nuremberg. The exhibition will incorporate the foyer area and the entrance hall with its characteristic spiral staircase, and is also expected to include the courtyard in front of the museum.
The exhibition title – Que-Sah – refers to one volume of the Brockhaus encyclopaedia, where alphabetical arrangement is used to give systematic order to the extremely varied lexical contents. On this subject Pernice has commented that, “Like the first entry in this volume (Quebec conferences) and the last one (Saho, stock farmers of northern Ethiopia), all the other conceptual phenomena that lie between them are also potential areas of artistic exploration.”
Manfred Pernice studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Braunschweig, completing his studies at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin in 1994. Since his impressive debut at the 1st Berlin Biennale in 1998, Pernice has participated in numerous major international exhibitions, including Manifesta (2000), Documenta 11 (2002), the Venice Biennale (2003) and, most recently, Skulptur-Projekte in Münster (2007).
Curators: Angelika Nollert and Melitta Kliege, Neues Museum
A catalogue will be published.
Supplementary events
Talk
Jan Verwoert, art critic, Berlin
Skulptur: Handeln, Text und Liebe im Raum
Tuesday, 29 April 2008, 7pm
Conversation with the artist
Manfred Pernice and Angelika Nollert
Tuesday, 27 May 2008, 7pm
