Maria Eichhorn: Reuchlinstraße 4b, 70178 Stuttgart

Since the late 1980s, Maria Eichhorn has achieved renown for works that critically analyze institutional structures and consequentially act on situational-specific conditions of social, legal, and economic authority. Eichhorn’s exhibition project, Reuchlinstraße 4b, 70178 Stuttgart (2023–), is constituted by processes and actions that respond to the ongoing history of property relations specific to the building at Reuchlinstraße 4b, which the City of Stuttgart has owned since 1936 and which the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart has rented since its founding in 1978. Through research of State archives and legal casework, this site-specific exhibition project revisits how the building’s acquisition was achieved by means of Nazi dispossession. In doing so, Eichhorn’s work challenges the City’s ownership rights over the property while laying bare crucial questions about continued use of the property by the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Rejecting nation-state exculpatory positions and notions of achieved reconciliation, Eichhorn’s work contributes to a broader critical horizon of intersectional thought on restitution and reparations.

Within the public space of the City of Stuttgart, one major component of Eichhorn’s exhibition project is a plaque to be affixed to the facade of the building at Reuchlinstraße 4b. In addition to establishing legal protections and restrictions that complicate future ownership rights over the building, this plaque also presents an informational text—a damning report that weaves together a family biography with an interrelated history of banking practices, confiscatory laws, and discriminatory statecraft. 

The plaque text is reproduced within the exhibition pamphlet, here as follows: Exhibition pamphlet.