Wassily Kandinsky
Kasimir Malevich
Piet Mondrian
Olafur Eliasson
Christoph Büchel
Thomas Demand
Max Ernst
Peter Fischli David Weiss
Roni Horn
Mike Kelley
Martin Kippenberger
Kris Martin
Henry Moore
Matt Mullican
Bruce Nauman
Gregor Schneider
Thomas Schütte
Jeff Wall
Marion Ackermann
Isabelle Malz
Marion Ackermann
Kathrin Beßen
Florence Thurmes
"Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian-The Infinite White Abyss" features circa 120 paintings, drawings, sculptures, architectural models, artist's books, magazines, and films. Olafur Eliasson's exercises in sensitization for art-lovers is available as the app Your exhibition guide free of charge. "Beneath the Ground. From Kafka to Kippenberger" features works by two modern and 12 contemporary artists.
Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian – The Infinite White Abyss
April 5 – July 6, 2014
K20 Grabbeplatz
Quadriennale Düsseldorf 2014
Curators: Marion Ackermann, Isabelle Malz
With Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian – The Infinite White Abyss (April 5 – July 6,
2014), the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen has organized the first museum
exhibition ever to explore the multifaceted significance of the white surface in the
works of Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian. In the early
twentieth century, these three artists embarked upon parallel paths toward
abstraction, a process within which the concept “white” enjoyed a very special
status. For all three artists, “white” was a symbol of a future world. This
exhibition therefore forms a very special component of the Quadriennale 2014 in
Düsseldorf, which is organized around the theme Beyond Tomorrow.
On view in the Klee Halle of the K20 will be circa 120 paintings, drawings,
sculptures, architectural models, artist’s books, magazines, and films. The display
objects come from various museum collections in Europe, the US, and Russia,
and as far away as Australia. Among the institutions that have sent works to
Düsseldorf on loan for this special presentation are the Tretyakov Gallery in
Moscow, the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.
The exhibition architecture, based on Mondrian’s drawings, and deliberately
emphasizing the theme of floating suspension, was designed by Thomas Stadler
(Stadler Prenn Architekten/Berlin). In order to visualize the multifarious
references, the diverse influences and sources of inspiration – which transcend
media and genre boundaries – that contributed to shaping the valence of white in
the works of these artists, four laboratories present a spectrum of historical
sources and discourses on occultism and the natural sciences, on color, film, and
architecture.
“The white, free abyss, infinity, lies before us,” claimed Kazimir Malevich in 1919,
coining a metaphor that would be seminal in his art. For him, the white surface as a kind
of emptiness is the monochrome ground against which geometric forms seem to float
weightlessly. In his search for a new existential basis for humanity, he perceived the
supremacy of white as the highest consummation of non-objectivity, which he
associated with idealistic visions of a radical project for a future society.
For Wassily Kandinsky, the white surface represented a space of possibilities; in white,
he perceived the originary power of evolution and spiritual elevation, one that harbored
a multiplicity of affirmative possibilities.
Evolutionary ideas also guided Mondrian’s interest in a universal truth whose existence
he believed lay beyond the objectively real. He developed his system of Neoplasticism
through the radical reduction of compositional elements to horizontal and vertical lines
and the three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue (and through their juxtaposition with
the three non-colors: black, gray, and white). In seeking to endow form and material with
expression through the three primary colors, Mondrian initially regarded the non-color
white as a neutral surface, but later deployed it to emblematize empty space.
During the years between 1880 and 1920, notions of an invisible, spatially ordered
fourth dimension were widely prevalent – and not just among natural scientists,
Theosophists, and writers. Stimulated by the writings of scientists and by popular
science, many artists were preoccupied with the fourth dimension, which they
associated with the expansion and liberation of human thought and with powers of
imagination.
They shared the conviction that existing somewhere behind the limitations of human
perception was an invisible reality, and that artists could gaze into this fourth dimension
and render it visible. Contemporary discoveries in physics shaped a new worldview; in
the works of artists such as Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian, this horizon of
imagination was expanded to a multidimensional, infinite cosmic and spiritual vastness
that was endowed with expression in their paintings by means of the white surface.
This exhibition, which is arranged chronologically, traces the investigations undertaken
by these three artists into the color white – which led each onto a different yet parallel
path of development – through a series of major works dating from 1911 to 1941. Each
painting occupies an entire wall: this allows the viewer to focus wholly on the individual
work and its differentiation of white areas, the quality of surface treatment and material
character, as well as the significance of these features within the composition as a
whole. At the same time, attention is devoted to the developmental processes to which
the white surface was subjected in the works of each artist, as well as their specific
approaches to handling white pigment. It becomes possible, moreover, to compare the
at times astonishing correspondences found in the paintings of these three artists, but
also to perceive their decisive differences in the handling of the non-color white.
The exhibition is sponsored by:
Quadriennale Düsseldorf 2014,
Kunststiftung NRW,
HSBC Trinkaus,
Schwarzkopf,
Corporate partner: the fashion and lifestyle enterprise Breuninger,
Media partner: Handelsblatt
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Olafur Eliasson: Dein Ausstellungsguide
April 5 – Aug 10, 2014
K20 Grabbeplatz
Quadriennale Düsseldorf 2014
Curators: Marion Ackermann, Isabelle Malz
From the K20 out into the World: Eliasson’s new app fosters a reeducation of the
senses
A daily flood of images tends to dull our senses; in a museum, we often take just
a few seconds to contemplate a work of art. The Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur
Eliasson attempts to counteract such perceptual desensitization through his
latest project: with Your exhibition guide, Eliasson encourages users to take in
their environments – whether in a museum or in everyday life – in fresh ways. We
are called upon to experience encounters with art in unfamiliar and fundamentally
different ways. While a typical exhibition guide supplies viewers with information
and answers to anticipated queries, Eliasson poses problems and invites art
lovers to trust their own senses (K20, April 5 – August 10, 2014). In addition to an
app, the project consists of a large installation in the spacious Grabbe Halle of the
K20.
Eliasson developed his provocative stimulus to thought for museum visitors in
collaboration with the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen and in close
coordination with the exhibition Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian: The Infinite
White Abyss, which explores the significance of the color white in the works of
three avant-garde painters (K20, Klee Halle, April 5 – July 6, 2014).
Initially conceived for the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf on
the occasion of the Quadriennale Düsseldorf 2014, Eliasson’s exercises in
sensitization for art-lovers is available as the app Your exhibition guide free of
charge, and can therefore be used in the future at other museums and art
institutions around the world.
In 11 brief films and an introduction, Eliasson addresses the viewer directly in his
exhibition guide: How does it feel to break with habitual patterns of vision? What if the
artworks weren’t art? What can be achieved by a radical shift of perspective – for
example the image of floating through the museum like an asteroid?
www.kunstsammlung.de“I’ve developed the exercises in this app specifically for exhibitions. Exhibitions offer a
great setting for exploring all of your senses. If you like the exercises they may help you
practise seeing yourself seeing, feeling yourself feeling and by doing so, you may be
able to amplify the greater potential that an artwork offers”, says Eliasson.
“For Eliasson and for us, it was a question of using the resources of modern
communication technologies to open up the traditional space of the museum – even
worldwide. I regard our collaborative project on the exhibition guide as a genuine
contribution to a discussion about the future of the museum as an institution,” explains
Marion Ackermann, Director of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. “It’s very
important to sensitize people to the finest nuances of perception – first of all in relation
to art, and then in relation to the world at large.”
As a further component of Dein Ausstellungsguide (Your exhibition guide), Eliasson is
exhibiting his installation Your museum primer in the spacious Grabbe Halle of the K20.
Revolving here in the darkened gallery is a prismatic ring that is illuminated by a single
beam of light, causing circles and arcs of light – now in white, now in the various
spectral colors – to wander across the walls.
Beginning on April 4, 2014, Your exhibition guide can be downloaded to smartphones or
computers free of charge from the App Store or from Google Play for the system
software iOS or Android. Moreover, visitors to the K20 can borrow iPads for their
exhibition visits. As a preview, excerpts of the app will be published on #32, the new
online magazine of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.
Eliasson’s project Dein Ausstellungsguide is a part of the LABOR program of the
Department of Education at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, and is sponsored
by the Stadtsparkasse Düsseldorf and the Sparkassen Kulturstiftung Rheinland.
#32 Online-Magazin der Kunstsammlung-Nordrhein-Westfalen
www.number32.de
Olafur Eliasson was born in Copenhagen in 1967, where he studied at the Royal
Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In 1995, he established a studio in Berlin. There, in
collaboration with a team that has meanwhile grown to ca. 75 members, and includes
technicians, architects, and art historians, he realizes his ideas and designs. The
spectrum of works, which he regards as experimental test protocols, encompasses
objects and sculptures, building projects and installations, photography and film. After
his appointment to teach at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), Eliasson established
the Institute for Spatial Experiments (2009–14) as a five-year learning experiment.
In 2003, Eliasson represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale; in the same year,
he showed his The weather project at the Tate Modern in London. In 2007, his survey
exhibition Take your time: Olafur Eliasson was installed at the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, and traveled to various venues up until 2010, including the Museum of
Modern Art and the PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York in 2008. His exhibition
Innen Stadt Außen at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in 2010 encompassed numerous
interventions into the urban space of Berlin. In projects such as Green river (1998–
2001), the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007, the New York City Waterfalls (2008), and
the façade for the Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik (2011; with Henning Larsen
Architects), Eliasson is preoccupied with public space. With this art project Little Sun, a
solar light in the form of a sun, Eliasson is concerned with making energy accessible to
all. In 2013, he was honored with the Goslar Kaiser Ring Award.
www.olafureliasson.net
www.twitter.com/olafureliasson
www.facebook.com/pages/Studio-Olafur-Eliasson/345642995504520
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Beneath the Ground. From Kafka to Kippenberger
April 5 – Aug 10, 2014
K21 Ständehaus
Quadriennale Düsseldorf 2014
Curators: Marion Ackermann, Kathrin Beßen, Florence Thurmes
Shelter and terror: the motif of life beneath the surface of the Earth ranges from
classical mythology to the utopian novels of Jules Verne and the writings of Franz
Kafka. And it is Kafka's unfinished story “The Burrow” that supplied the impulse
and background for the exhibition “Beneath the Ground. From Kafka to
Kippenberger” at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, on view during the
Quadriennale Düsseldorf 2014. The descent below ground – into bunkers, cellars,
caves, grottoes, and tunnels – that has receives such frequent literary expression
is closely associated with the utopias and anti-utopias of the twentieth century.
For this reason, the exhibition – on view from April 5 to August 10 at the K21, and
featuring works by two modern and 12 contemporary artists – fits perfectly into
the Quadriennale program, whose theme is Beyond Tomorrow.
The individual chapters of the presentation deal with entryways and thresholds,
with retreat or departure into subterranean worlds, with the link between the
underground and the unconscious or uncanny, and with juxtapositions of fictive
and concrete spaces. On view – in the lower level of the K21, of course – are
large-format installations and intensive individual works by Christoph Büchel,
Thomas Demand, Max Ernst, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Roni Horn, Mike Kelley,
Martin Kippenberger, Kris Martin, Henry Moore, Matt Mullican, Bruce Nauman,
Gregor Schneider, Thomas Schütte, and Jeff Wall.
Associated with the displacement of the inhabited environment beneath the surface of
the Earth are both visions of hell and the protective refuge of caves. Having an impact
on conceptualizations of the subterranean in the popular and artistic imagination were
both Freud’s investigations of the human psyche and in particular the connection
between the unconscious and the cellar in the early-20th-century dream interpretations
of C.G. Jung. Decisive as well were the traumatic experiences of two world wars and the
utilization of underground spaces as bunkers. Serving as points of departure and
sources of inspiration for modern and contemporary artists have been literary
elaborations of certain motifs, in particular the interdependency between images of
protective zones and situations of danger, along with real circumstances and personal
experiences.
In his Shelter Sketchbooks, produce as a war correspondent in London in 1941, Henry
Moore depicted the inhabitants of London seeking shelter from the air raids of the
German “blitzkrieg” in Great Britain in the tunnels of the city's underground train system.
Oppressive documents of contemporary history, the Sketchbooks visualize people
crowding together, in perpetual fear, in search for safety. For Thomas Schütte, bunker
and underground become possibilities for imaginary retreat of the human as such. In the
early 1980s, to some extent as a response to the continuous threat of the Cold War,
Schütte produced a series of bunker models whose forms are reminiscent of body parts
and openings, and hence become symbols of self-protection.
The threatening mood of the 1930s, and finally of World War II, strongly influenced Max
Ernst, who spent time in southern France in 1938. Long before most of his Surrealist
colleagues, Ernst was preoccupied with psychoanalysis, and Freud’s theories in
particular. He drew inspiration for his motifs and their uncanny and ambiguous
atmosphere from literary figures such as Kafka. In southern France, Ernst produced a
series of pictures depicting apparently imaginary landscapes, and apparently containing
both aboveground trees and the stalagmites of caves. Here, the interior of the earth is in
some sense mirrored outwardly, manifest on the surface. During preparations for his
large-format Grotto photographs, intended to emblematize the ideal cave, Thomas
Demand came across this series by Ernst. In contrast to the almost chance-determined
accumulation of blotches in Ernst, Demand planned and built the model for his grotto
with great precision. Like Ernst’s landscapes, the photographs he subsequently
produced seem all the more unreal for this very reason.
We encounter a similar construction of reality and fiction in Jeff Wall’s photographs The
Well, The Drain, and The Flooded Grave. All three images show the transition to the
subterranean: a man-made hole, a drainage pipe, and a grave that is filled with water
and marine life forms, which is to say spaces imagined by the artist. Here, the tension
between staged composition and seemingly spontaneous snapshot becomes palpable.
An entry into the bowels of the earth is described as well in the series To Place –
Verne's Journey by Roni Horn, who searched in Iceland for the actual volcano that
served Jules Verne as a fictive entry point in his novel Journey to the Center of the
Earth. Matt Mullican, in contrast, draws inspiration from the Hades of classical
mythology. In his drawings, the entrance to the maw of hell becomes a simple chalk
circle or heap of stones, and in his performances, an experience that is for him intensely
physical. That the ground beneath the Earth is not necessarily negatively implicated, but
can at times be radiant as well is revealed by Kris Martin in his new work Unter der
Erde scheint die Sonne (The Sun Shines beneath the Ground). An engraved piece of
marble is embedded halfway into the ground, a humorous allusion to the inversion of
above and below, or to another world at the center of the earth. When Roni Horn, on the
other hand, makes an incision through the soil in her Ant Farm, exposing the internal life
of an anthill, the beholder becomes a voyeur in a way that is reminiscent of Kafka’s story
The Burrow. In this late work, Kafka frames his narrative from the perspective of an
animal that is seized by a paranoid compulsion to dig a subterranean, labyrinth-style
system of passageways with self-tormenting perfectionism: as a result, the burrow
becomes a place of retreat, but at the same time of menace.
For his Audio-Video Underground Chamber, Bruce Nauman constructed a concrete
chamber beneath the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna. For the
duration of the exhibition, and as a premier showing, the sparse signals from the
Austrian museum will be transmitted via camera and microphone into the K21. It is
impossible to enter this visually abstract space or to locate it precisely. Like Nauman’s
models of tunnels and drawings, the chamber is a stimulus to reflect upon imaginary
and real spaces. The video projection Kanal-Video by Peter Fischli David Weiss, in
contrast, stages documentary material on Zürich’s sewer network. Edited to provide a
centralized perspectival view of the sewer system, the video offers an endless journey
through Zürich's municipal underground.
Many contemporary artists have been fascinated by Freud’s theory of the unconscious,
among them Mike Kelley. In his installation Sublevel, which depicts the basement level
of his art school in Los Angeles, he refers to psychoanalysis, marking sexual drives by
means of phalli and other toys. The repressed is translated into pink crystals, which also
represents the interior of the human body. The subterranean is discovered to be
sensuous and filled with sexual connotations as well in Martin Kippenberger’s Tiefes
Kehlchen (Deep Throat). Originally installed in the side wing of the newly constructed U-
Bahn 3 subway line in Vienna, it converts the underground realm – the mythological
underworld – into an accessible installation. The constructed spaces of Gregor
Schneider seduce the viewer in similarly associative ways. His spartan Kinderzimmer
(No.2) (Children's Room (Nr. 2)) is accessed exclusively via an enormous drainpipe that
is set into the wall. The model was a house in an abandoned village that had to yield to
the large soft coal mining district around Garzweiler near Mönchengladbach. The point
of departure for Christoph Büchel’s works is documentary research into volatile social
themes. Büchel’s Spider Hole, for example, is a replica of the dugout where Saddam
Hussein was captured in December of 2003. With this title, the artist refers directly to the
“spider hole” of the CNN reports that were the first to break the news of Hussein’s
capture. In military lingo, a spider hole is a man-sized foxhole that serves as an
observation point. Büchel has literally excavated this structure from the earth and set it
on steel girders.
The exhibition will be accompanied by readings, film evenings, a performance by
Jan Köchermann, and a subterranean city map of Düsseldorf, which can also be
explored as a digital computer game. Together with an admission ticket, each
visitor to the exhibition will receive the first publication of Kafka’s story in book
form as a self-contained text; Roni Horn has illustrated this edition of “Der Bau”
(The Burrow) on commission from the Kunstsammlung. Based on his piece for
this exhibition, Kris Martin has developed an edition on paper.
The exhibition is sponsored by:
Quadriennale Düsseldorf 2014,
Kulturstiftung des Bundes / German Federal Cultural Foundation,
the Stiftung Kunst, Kultur und Soziales (foundation for art, culture, and social concerns)
of Sparda-Bank West,
Corporate partner: the fashion and lifestyle enterprise Breuninger
Media partner: Handelsblatt
Image: Olafur Eliasson, Your museum primer, 2014, Acrylic prism ring, colour-effect filter glass ring, projector, HMI lamp, motor, wire, Dimensions variable, Installation view: K20 Grabbeplatz, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Photo: Achim Kukulies, Düsseldorf; Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Head of Communication / Press officer
Gerd Korinthenberg
phone +49 (0)211.8381-730
K20 GRABBEPLATZ
Grabbeplatz 5, 40213 Düsseldorf
K21 STÄNDEHAUS
Ständehausstraße 1, 40217 Düsseldorf
Tuesday through Friday 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Saturdays, Sundays, holidays 11 a.m.-6 p.m.
Mondays closed
1st Wednesday of each month KPMG Kunstabend (free admission from 6 p.m.) 10 a.m.-10 p.m
Opening Hours for Quadriennale Düsseldorf 2014
The opening hours are going to be extended:
Tue - Sun, Hols opened from 10 a.m.
K20 Grabbeplatz
Thursday through Sunday
until 10 p.m.
Not valid on holidays:
18 April, 2014
01 May, 2014
29 May, 2014
19 June, 2014
Opened until 6 p.m.