MINIMALISM AND AFTER II
New Aquisitions
John M Armleder, Richard Artschwager, Wolfgang Berkowski, Stephen Bram, Daniel Buren, Ian Burn, Hanne Darboven, Gene Davis, Hermann Glöckner, Benoit Gollety, Katharina Grosse, Esther Hiepler, Sol LeWitt, John McLaughlin, Olivier Mosset, David Novros, Charlotte Posenenske, Gerwald Rockenschaub, Henryk Stazewski, Katja Strunz, Michael Zahn.
Daimler Contemporary
February 14
- May 18, 2003
new opening hours:
daily 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Untitled (FS 80), 1985
Enamel on pavatex, table, covered with melamine, panelUntitled, 2002
Wood, partly black paint
John M Armleder
*1948 in Geneva, CH, lives in Geneva, CHUntitled (FS 80), 1985
Enamel on pavatex, table, covered with melamine, panelAbstraction and ready-made, two of the key innovations in 20th century art, come together in John Armleder's Furniture Sculptures (FS). In formal terms, FS 80 relates to the early American Minimalists' sculpture ensembles, though their idealistic impetus is undermined by the trivial piece of furniture. The dotted grid takes up a basic theme of abstract painting that frequently has a strictly theoretical basis, but this is also trivialized and ironized when we realize that we are looking at standard trade sound insulation material.
Armleder's work plays with the accumulated »abundance of meaning« of art history, but the longer we look at it the more the impression becomes one of pitiful decorative »emptiness«. The polarization of mind and matter, ideal and garbage is not valid any longer - and John Armleder knows that. This is both a loss and a gain: a loss of orientation, but a gain in terms freedom to decide.
Katja Strunz
*1970 in Ottweiler, D, lives in Berlin, DUntitled, 2002
Wood, partly black paintKatja Strunz's reliefs unfold into the reality determined by time and space. Strunz uses several vanishing points. This reinforces the artificial character of her objects and detaches her approach from traditional spatial concepts concentrating on a single viewing-point for observers.
The surfaces of her works consist of planes thrusting apart from each other, while their three-dimensional quality is dispersed by the ends running out at acute angles. In this way the artist is able to evoke the remoteness of utopian space. Katja Strunz's reliefs take up the crystalline folded sculptures of the Minimalists and the Land Art sculptor Robert Smithson from the early 60s, while at the same time retaining a very European dimension: »I am concerned with the difference between past and present, the discontinuous effect and the construction of the past in the present.« (K.S.)
