June 2001
New Aquisitions Photography, Video, Mixed Media Daimler Contemporary
Doug Aitken, Ian Anüll, Cor Dera, Walter Giers, Isabell Heimerdinger, Thomas Locher, François Morellet, Eva Maria Reiner, Pietro Sanguineti, Roman Signer, Georg Winter
Daimler Contemporary
16. June - 21. October 2001
The Daimler-Chrysler Collection was started in 1977, and grew by engaging with the picture as a classical format, and the major trends in abstract-geometrical art in the 20th century.
This approach was taken partly because the early initiators of the collection wanted to build up a cultural identity with the characteristic ideas and personalities of south-west German painting in particular, and of post-war European art in general.
But the collection was also restricted to pictures because of the conditions and demands imposed by a company collection: the works were intended to be shown, both on a permanent basis and in changing selections, in spaces that were not museums; this is a maxim that still drives the concept behind the collection to a large extent.
Doug Aitken, Francois Morellet, Georg Winter
But even in the 90s, careful attention started to be paid to the radically changing forms in which contemporary art was presented, and the new media that it was using. Light, video, photography and multi-media wall-mounted objects found their way into the collection. This cautious expansion, based on the profile that the collection had defined for itself, was linked with names like François Morellet, Nam June Paik, Christian Megert, Pietro Sanguineti, Walter Giers, Michael Wesely and Kay Hassan, winner of the Daimler Award for South African Art, first presented in 1999.
The "June 2001" exhibition picks up at this point with new acquisitions from the fields of photography, video and mixed media, and attempts to pursue some lines, but to redefine and justify others.
We link up with 90s acquisitions with works by Morellet, Locher and Goers, and also with Pietro Sanguineti's light-mirror-object "showtime". His group of works already in the DaimlerChryster Collection was augmented once more by an early textual work, new examples of his light-boxes and some videos, so that all stages of his output are more fully represented. The Daimler Art Collection intends to pursue this approach in future as well: we will continue to concern ourselves with subsequent work by individual artists whose positions formulate and illustrate, representatively and at a high level, the questions raised and trends followed by contemporary art.
Cor Dera
Pietro Sanguineti
(now), Dialeuchtkasten
Following John Armleder, Sylvie Fleury, Daniele Buetti and Ugo Rondinone, two more Swiss artists are represented by video works in the "June 2001" exhibition, Roman Signer and Ian Anüll; both have made an important contribution to Justifying the medium of video as a three-dimensional pictorial form on the borders of a conceptually grounded view of sculpture, drawing and performance. The photographic and video works of Doug Aitken and Isabell Heimerdinger also belong in this context.
The powerful presence of the cinema film, which makes us accept so much. permeating our consciousness and our physical gestures, is the subject of all Heimerdinger's work. In the case of Doug Aitken the characteristic we would like to identify is the stream of virtual, electrifying energy that pulls the elements of his photographic and video works together, - bodies as well as cities and thoughts -, and makes them into flaring, flickering ornaments.
The three catalogues produced in 2001 also show some focal points - alongside the principle of continuing the abstract and conceptual tendencies (Zero, Minimal Art, the Constructivist tradition) - that apply to the biographical and artistic origins of the artists involved.
There are just under forty names in all, including six young artists whose biographies are closely linked with Stuttgart and Berlin, Daimler's two great locations in Germany (Heimerdinger, Miller, Reiner, Sanguineti, Westerwinter, Winter).
The Daimler Art Collection's early and typical link with the "Zurich Concrete" group is continued by the contemporary Swiss artist mentioned above. Finally, names like Aitken, Dera, Hastings, Kosuth, Rockenschaub, Walther, Zittel and Zobernig, along with the other artists named, represent the Daimler Art Collection's openness to developments in international contemporary art.