Artur-Ladebeck-Straße 5
33602 Bielefeld
Germany
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–6pm,
Wednesday 11am–9pm,
Saturday 10am–6pm
T +49 521 329995017
info@kunsthalle-bielefeld.de
Dóra Maurer: Seen This Way and Seen Differently
January 29–May 15, 2022
Dóra Maurer (b. 1937, lives in Budapest) is considered today as a prominent figure on the Hungarian neo-avant-garde scene. She was part of a progressive art movement that began developing outside of Hungary’s official cultural policies in the 1960s. To this day, she is primarily known for her colorful, overlapping grids, the so-called Displacements, as well as the Quasi pictures and Overlappings based on them. Due to both the non-representational nature of her works as well as her contacts and travels in the West prior to 1989 (permitted thanks to her Hungarian-Austrian dual citizenship), Maurer occupies a special position within the Hungarian art world, which in those days was mainly dominated by Socialist Realism. In her experiments in photography and film in the 1970s, as well as in her abstract, geometric works based on a process of displacement, there are obvious parallels to Western European and American post-war art.
In fact, however, her oeuvre is inconceivable without her experience of life under the official Hungarian system during the socialist period. The exhibition will contain around 60 works of art created over five decades in the various mediums of print, film, photography, and painting.
Following Water
June 4–October 16, 2022
In summer of 2022, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld will present an exhibition dedicated to water. Based on its collection of 20th and 21st century art, it follows the question: Which themes, objects and contexts appear when we look at water in art? The existential element that determines the wide-ranging dimensions of human beings – culture, ecology, politics, economy, body and mind – is a central topic of art in various forms of appearance. Representations of the sea, lakes, rivers and harbors meet works that use the motif as a means of abstraction. Together they extend the immense field of projection that the element holds: Water as idyll, resource, trade route, force of nature and commodity, water as medium and indicator of transformation, vitality and creation as well as water as living or escapist space.
With works by Willi Baumeister, Katinka Bock, Catherina Cramer & Giulietta Ockenfuß, Carolina Caycedo, Max Ernst, Lyonel Feininger, Ferdinand Hodler, Roni Horn, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Wassily Kandinsky, Otto Mueller, Gabriele Münter, Kenneth Noland, Adrian Paci, Enrique Ramírez, Robert Smithson, Hiroshi Sugimoto and many more.
Thomas Ruff / James Welling
November 5, 2022–March 5, 2023
We perceive our environment in the way we can describe it in pictures or words. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Bielefeld brings together Thomas Ruff (b. 1958, lives in Düsseldorf) and James Welling (b. 1951, lives in New York), two artists who wrest new possibilities of the photographic image and thus expand our field of vision as well as our imagination. In their work, both artists address the conditions of seeing, their connection with the photographic apparatus and thus our conditioning of the perception of the world through photographic images. Not only since digitalization has the photographic image not necessarily been what it claims to be, namely an objective depiction of what there is.
Starting with the series of works that explicitly deal with architecture and urban space, the exhibition is about thematic juxtapositions of the extraordinarily experimental and explorative approaches of both artists. In addition to the series of works that deal with anonymous as well as iconic architecture, the arc of argumentation meanders between the examination of the photogram, the question of abstraction and autonomy of the photographic image.
Against the background of the upcoming modernization and renovation of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Thomas Ruff and James Welling are invited to refer to our museum building designed by Philip Johnson in 1968. While Thomas Ruff has repeatedly dealt with iconic buildings by Mies van der Rohe or Herzog de Meuron, there are series of works by James Welling in which he worked with buildings by Philip Johnson, the “Glass House” in New Cannaan or the “Sculpture Garden” at MoMA, New York.
For further information, media requests or further inquiries, please contact presse [at] kunsthalle-bielefeld.de
