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K20
Lygia Pape: The Skin of ALL
March 19–July 17, 2022
Reinhard Mucha
September 3, 2022–January 22, 2023
Piet Mondrian: Evolution
October 29, 2022–February 12, 2023
K21
Gerhard Richter
Birkenau Cycle: Drawings. Overpainted Photos
December 18, 2021–April 24, 2022
Look at Me: Photography from The Walther Collection
April 9–September 25, 2022
Reinhard Mucha
September 3, 2022–January 22, 2023
Gerhard Richter
Birkenau-Paintings, Drawings, Overpainted Photographs
December 18, 2021–April 24, 2022
Press conference: December 16, 2021, 11am, K21
In his work spanning six decades, Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) has, on numerous occasions, engaged with the vexed subject of the Holocaust and how Nazi atrocities can, if at all, be depicted. It wasn’t until his Birkenau Cycle, made in 2014, that Richter found an angle on and a form for this troublesome subject matter. The work is based on four photographs that were secretly taken by prisoners, at great personal risk, in the Auschwitz/Birkenau concentration camp.
Richter initially transferred the photographs onto canvases, enlarging the scale. When the results did not meet his expectations, he began to paint over them until the figuration ulti-mately disappeared.
These four abstract paintings are shown together with four grey mirrors hanging opposite the paintings and the prints of the four photos from the concentration camp in an installation characterised by reflections, references and relationships. Richter asks fundamental ques-tions about the possibilities and limits of painting and representation. He thereby creates a space for reflection and memory.
The exhibitions in the Bel Etage are supported by the Sparda Bank West Foundation for Art, Culture and Society.
Lygia Pape: The Skin of ALL
March 19–July 17, 2022
Press conference: March 17, 2022, 11am, K20
#K20Pape #LygiaPape #K20 #ProjetoLygiaPape
The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is dedicating its first solo exhibition in Germany to the Brazilian modernist, Lygia Pape (1927–2004). Titled The Skin of ALL, the exhibition presents the artist’s multifaceted, interdisciplinary oeuvre, which, based on her irrepressible love of experimentation, was developed continuously over five decades.
Her oeuvre includes abstract-geometric paintings, drawings, reliefs, unique woodcuts, two ballet compositions, sculptures and poems, as well as experimental films, immersive spatial installations or collective performances and explorations of public space.
Together with Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape was one of the key figures of the neo-concrete movement of the 1950s and 1960s in Brazil. Her specific understanding of a geometric abstraction resulted in a radical new conception of concrete-constructivist art. In addition to ethical and socio-political issues and against the backdrop of the twenty-year-long dictatorship in Brazil, Lygia Pape harnessed her poetic works to champion experimental and sensory experiences of every stripe. For her, the viewers were the actual creators of her works.
A Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen exhibition in conjunction with Projeto Lygia Pape.
Look at Me: Photography from The Walther Collection
April 9–September 25, 2022
Press conference and preview: April 7, 2022, 11am, K21
#LookatMe #TheWaltherCollection #K21
From April 9–September 25, 2022, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in collaboration with The Walther Collection, will stage the largest-ever presentation in Germany of the Neu-Ulm and New York-based collection.
Look at Me presents groundbreaking photographic works from Africa and the African dias-pora that exemplify the conception and history of photography as a medium at the heart of the extensive Walther Collection. As a non-profit foundation, The Walther Collection has ded-icated itself to the critical research of photography and media art in worldwide exhibitions and academic publications since the early 2000s. Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019), one of the most influential curators of recent decades, was instrumental in compiling the collection and pre-senting it for the first time in 2010. Based on this exhibition, the serially-arranged cycles of works by photographers, such as Yto Barrada, Samuel Fosso, David Goldblatt, Seydou Keïta, Santu Mofokeng, Zanele Muholi and Malick Sidibé, form the bedrock of “Look at Me”: they show people presenting and staging themselves in front of the camera, thus addressing complex questions about the colonial gaze, social identity and gender. The exhibition critical-ly examines how identity has been defined over time and how it is viewed.
Look at Me is also dedicated in parallel to individual self-empowerment, as well as the postcolonial gaze. The criteria of typology and systematic classification are of central im-portance here, comparable, for example, to the works of August Sander or Bernd and Hilla Becher, which are also part of The Walther Collection. The exhibition draws attention to the contradictions and shared concerns of such artistic photographic projects.
The exhibition has been jointly conceived in conjunction with The Walther Collection; advised by Contemporary And (C&).
Reinhard Mucha
September 3, 2022–January 22, 2023
Press conference: September 1, 2022, 11am
#K20K21Mucha #ReinhardMucha #K20K21
Reinhard Mucha’s work, in terms of its redefinition of sculpture, photography and installation, is considered to be one of the most important positions in contemporary art. At its two locations K20 and K21, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen combines installations by Mucha (b. Düsseldorf 1950) in this exhibition that have not been seen for many years, featuring works from each one of his creative phases and thus creating a panorama that spans over forty years of the artist’s work. In addition to the installation Das Deutschlandgerät (The Germany Device) [2002] 1990, which was reconstructed in K21 from 2002 onwards and was originally made for the German Pavilion at the 1990 Biennale di Venezia, his early seminal work Wartesaal (Waiting Room) [1997], [1986] 1979–1982–which has not been shown publicly since documenta X, 1997–will be on view. Das Figur-Grund Problem in der Architektur des Barock (für dich allein bleibt nur das Grab) (The Figure-Ground Problem in Baroque Architecture (for You Alone There Remains Only the Grave), one of the few remaining larger installations of museum furniture and everyday objects, will be realised anew for the first time since 1985 in K20’s Grabbehalle,
The exhibition is supported by the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne and the Kunststiftung NRW.
The exhibitions in the Bel Etage are supported by the Sparda Bank West Foundation for Art, Culture and Society.
Piet Mondrian: Evolution
October 29, 2022–February 12, 2023
#K20Mondrian #PietMondrian #K20
Press conference: October 27, 2022, 11am, K20
The world-renowned painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) is famous for his astringent, geometric compositions in black and white with selected primary colour fields in red, blue or yellow. Yet it is not commonly known that the Dutchman opted to paint landscapes and other figurative motifs in his early years as an artist and often staged them with a surprising palette of colours. The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen delineates Mondrian’s artistic path from his early endeavours in painting to his wholly abstract works and traces the connections between the different groups of paintings.
From the beginning of his career as an artist, Mondrian was in search of the ideal composition. In his view, this comprised the perfect balance of all pictorial elements. Mondrian readily came across motifs—windmills, lighthouses, the dunes by the sea and the water, in which farms and rows of trees were reflected—in his homeland. This selection of paintings provides an insight into his work in the studio and his individual experimentation with colours and forms with the aid of Cubist stylistic elements, before turning to pure abstraction at the beginning of the 1920s.
The exhibition is courtesy of the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, in conjunction with the Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
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