Gregor Schneider: Wall Before Wall

The key medium of Gregor Schneider’s creative practice is the construction of rooms inside similar pre-existing rooms, the doubling of rooms, people and objects, the reconstruction of a building he cannot attain. His best-known work is the installation of 24 rooms of his “Haus u r” in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 2001.

“Experiences affect all the senses and are based on an unfathomable world.”
–Gregor Schneider

Over the course of 30 years, Gregor Schneider has created a body of work that touches upon some of society’s most sensitive sore spots. In the beginning of his career, he developed the concept of an artistic practice that devours its own products, thereby questioning the subjection of art to economic necessity. Later, he saw parallels between  the secret, antiseptic high-security detainee cells of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp with the “white cube” of museums and galleries. In 2008, he spoke about creating a room to die in and his desire to show a dying person in a museum. He received death threats as a result. Schneider has staged cultural crossovers, tried to link an Islamic and a Catholic sacred site and has responded to the return of the spirit of the Nazi era with the pulverisation of the house in which Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels had been born in.

“Gregor Schneider makes the museum space disappear. In so doing, he runs the very real risk of completely redefining the fundamental conditions of presenting art. The result is a new and different way of looking that is heightened and extremely concentrated. It is provocative and precise, critical and alarming.”
–Rein Wolfs

The exhibition takes the viewer on a largely chronological tour with stops at the key stations of Schneider’s work. At the end of the journey, visitors find themselves in a rotting, mud-filled weather-exposed room, Schneider’s ideal museum space.

The catalogue accompanying Wall Before Wall illustrates the key works that allow us to distinguish more than 15 stations within Gregor Schneider’s work to date, and it complements these with detailed comments by the artist and the curator.

Exhibition Curator: Ulrich Loock

Director: Rein Wolfs
Exhibition Manager: Susanne Kleine

Head of Corporate Communications/Press Officer: Sven Bergmann
T +49 228 9171 204 / presse [​at​] bundeskunsthalle.de

Current exhibitions:

Touchdown. An Exhibition with and about People with Down’s Syndrome (until March 12, 2017)
A Brief History of Humankind. 100,000 Years of Cultural History (until March 26, 2017)

Soon to come:
Katharina Sieverding. Art and Capital. From 1967 to 2017 (March 11–July 16, 2017)

The Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn, is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media on the basis of a resolution of the German Parliament.