Schaf und Ruder / Wool and Water

An exhibition with Lili Dujourie, Isa Genzken, Astrid Klein, Mischa Kuball, Aron Mehzion, Reinhard Mucha, Sturtevant, Rosemarie Trockel, and Gerhard Richter

Every day we take several prolonged looks or fleeting glances in the mirror and barely think about the medium and its fascinating properties and applications: inverted, depicting, imaginary, spatial, reflecting, transparent, narcissistic, medical, etc. The 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll transports us into the wonderland, into the fascinating, surreal world of doublings and reflections. The title of the exhibition is taken from the fifth chapter of the book, with the following passage: “The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things—but the oddest part of it all was that whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty: though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold. ‘Things flow about so here!’” Beyond a broad interpretation of the artworks as an observatory of human perception in this exhibition, Schaf und Ruder / Wool and Water also offers a critique of the art market.

Against the background of fictional, imaginary space, and entering into the real space of the exhibition, various questions open up that have to do with our reflection and its interpretations, and ultimately with the self and self-consciousness. The fascination of the self in the virtual pictorial space of the mirror reveals tensions between the subject and its environment. Beginning with the genre of sculpture and its concrete materials, the works in the exhibition reflect relationships between the individual and the world and allow tangible interpretations.

The American artist Elaine Sturtevant’s copies of works by Marcel Duchamp and Robert Gober deal with questions about the original and the ambisexual. The Belgian artist Lili Dujourie has asked equally direct and conceptual questions about art and its minimalist and sensory relationships in her work since 1967 (the year of the founding of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf with its brutalist concrete architecture). A political attitude and a political space appear just as radically in the work of Astrid Klein: the determination of the value of a reference lies in the subjective feeling of the viewer. Rosemarie Trockel addresses this aspect in a very personal and humorous way. In the work of Isa Genzken, a Large Window becomes a basic expansion not only of architecture (against O.M. Ungers), but of proportion and built space. The window onto the world is also a reflective foil of the world, as Mischa Kuball demonstrates with platon’s mirror. Projection screens, monitors, foils, and mirrors are metaphors for our human imagination.

The question of the materiality of objects and their unclear re-functionalization plays an important double role as a work and an effect in the works of Reinhard Mucha. Work, history, and meaning are stored in materials and locations, and context and environment always also define an attitude and a positioning. Aron Mehzion, by contrast, leads us into a labyrinth of references to the philosophy of perception, an endless imaginary space, the fourth dimension; after all, our world is becoming increasingly complicated—media, science, our selves. Our tasks are becoming ever more complex, and our perspectives on time and space are becoming increasingly tangled. Furthermore, Mehzion and Kuball indirectly allude to a central reference for this exhibition: the work Mirror by the painter Gerhard Richter, which has belonged to the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (which does not have a collection) since 1981. In this work, as in Mucha’s MÄNNER FRAUEN from 1981, the references are clear and the works include many possible meanings.

The exhibition is a spatial experiment with multilayered levels of depiction and reflects various aspects of the relationship between space and pictures, from multiple perspectives, from original images and copies. It asks questions about what art, artworks, work, the world, sex and gender, the self, and its reflection can be as models of knowledge. In the doubling of the world behind the mirror, paradoxically a concrete frame of reference opens for our questions about the real and possible forms of reality that lies between things. Thus, in addition to the general question of sensuality and aesthetics, the exhibition explores knowledge, values, and correlations as a central question and answer in space, especially in the mirrored subjunctive of an autonomous, independent exhibition venue.

The exhibition was produced by the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and curated by Gregor Jansen.