calendario eventi  :: 

X

15/5/2004

Ugo Rondinone

Sprengel Museum, Hannover

Ugo Rondinone * 1964 aus:
I don't live here anymore (2000)
Les Krims * 1943
Photographs from the Sixties and Seventies

Curator Inka Schube

In what is now ten years of cooperation between Ann and Jürgen Wilde and the Sprengel Museum Hannover - which considers itself fortunate to be able to accommodate Ann and Jürgen Wilde's photographic collection on permanent loan - this exhibition of works by Les Krims and Ugo Rondinone marks a step in a new direction. After countless presentations, which since 1993 have been devoted primarily to photographers of the Twenties, we are showing for the first time artwork from the recent past: I don't live here anymore from Ugo Rondinone. It is contrasted in this room with a series of photographs by the American photographer Les Krims dating from the late Sixties/early Seventies and is opening a series of dialogue-type presentations in which two generations of artists of the image will be brought together on a common theme.

The Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, who studied at the University of Applied Arts of Vienna from 1986 to 1990, is best known for his hyper-artificial room installations. Not infrequently, his exhibition rooms are converted into stage sets in which the viewers become the protagonists. The performances in which they thus participate often operate with a conception of time oscillating between leisure and boredom and saturated with the experience of pop. These productions generate challenging ambiguities of self-experience, for which the artist offers himself as the projection surface and ambivalent identifying figure. "Ugo Rondinone enjoys using collectively comprehensible motifs that elicit unequivocal associations and lend symbolic support to sense experience. Whatever the medium - photography, landscape, circular picture, comics, sculptures or installations - Rondinone's treatment of aesthetic everyday phenomena jolts the viewer into ultimately calling into question the role of the artist as a communicator of authentic personal experiences in the age of mass culture and omnipresent media." (Anne Helwing)

In the extensive series I don't live here anymore, which was initiated in 1995 and to which the prints exhibited here from the edition of the same name can be ascribed, Rondinone uses digital image-processing software to impose his own face on photographic scenes from the fashion world. The often androgynous physiques of the female models communicate with the artist's frequently melancholic physiognomy that defies all clichés of beauty. Pictures from the promotional output of the fashion industry, which are always tied to more or less anonymous projections of desires, are appropriated and individualized by demonstratively enhancing their artificiality. "Rondinone is without doubt a contemporary romantic, but at the same time an existentialist, which would seem to be a contradiction. He confronts us with metaphors of longing from a direct relationship with the world and its reality, as manifested perhaps with the greatest immediacy and clarity in the global issues of identity, sexuality and love." (Jan Winkelmann)

The photographic work of the American Les Krims deal - albeit in a totally different way - with the absurdity of the commonplace and unfulfilled desires in aggressively challenging replications of reality and projections. In doing so he often resorts to stereotypes of nude photography and conventional clichés of human living and uses them in grotesque and almost anecdotal scenes. The images of femininity that Les Krims invents in the process should not necessarily be identified as male fantasies, as they often occur as melancholic, absurd settings of a female ego in various phases of life. Les Krims thus also formulates an androgyny of the gaze that unsettles the viewer's position before the fixed photographic image. The sepia tint of the pictures opens up a broad, quasi-historical frame of reference by enabling the artist's highly personal photographic creations - despite their strongly narrative structures - to serve as universally valid Kafkaesque descriptions of the human condition in modern society.

In their very different ways and with about 30 years between them, both Ugo Rondinone and Les Krims thus advocate irony and melancholy as a basic posture towards the impositions of an alienated present.


September 16, 2004 – February 13, 2005
Helga Paris
Photography

Helga Paris was born in 1938 in what was then a German town named Gollnow, which is now part of Poland called Goleniów. She grew up on the outskirts of East Berlin and is considered one of the most significant, late post-war period woman photographers in Germany.
The exhibition focuses on the artist's early works. These consist of individual pieces and series, mostly depicting her environment in East Berlin. These include "Pubs in Berlin" (1974), "Siebenbuergen" (1980) , "Berlin Youth" (1981-82), "Georgia" (1982), "Women in the Treffmodelle Garment Factory" (1984) and "Self-Portraits" (1981-89).


September 29, 2004 – January 9, 2005
On view untill January 9, 2005
Werner Heldt (1904-1954)
Berlin Dreams

The Sprengel Museum Hannover is pleased to mark the 100th birthday and 50th anniversary of the death of Werner Heldt with a comprehensive retrospective exhibition.
The exhibition at the Sprengel Museum Hannover concentrates on Heldt's "Drawings of Dreams" series. From 1930, the artist realised a number of works that express his visions, hopes and dreams. Other early works, from the beginning of the 1930s, transport the viewer to vaulted cellars and dark, dank grotto-like spaces in which one could imagine grisly things taking place. This was at the time that the artist, who was born and raised in Berlin, completed his studies at the Berlin Academy of Arts and proceeded to spend a year in Paris.


October 3, 2004 – January 16, 2005
Andy Warhol.
Self-Portraits

For the first time ever, anywhere, a comprehensive retrospective of Andy Warhol’s self-portraits. The Pop Art artist’s self-portraits provide insights into elements of Warhol, the media figure, as well as into his artistic oeuvre. More than 50 paintings and nearly as many works on paper, photographs, collages and films representing 40 years of intense artistic activity.
Warhol realised a number of self-portraits, from early works as a young man, to his premature death in February 1987: paintings, drawings and photographs. Almost none of the pictures is in the tradition of what is commonly expected of a self-portrait. They do not provide the viewer with glimpses into the soul of the artist, nor do they seem to strive to express insights into the man himself. Warhol’s self-portraits are pure presentation. They express his extreme need to be exhibitionist, to be a public figure, while also containing an element of anonymity, and evidence of a private sphere as well.

Press & Public Relations: Caroline Flosdorff
T + 49 (0)511 168- 4 39 24, F + 49 (0)511 168- 4 50 93

Sprengel Museum Hannover
Kurt-Schwitters-Platz 30169 Hannover

stampa

permanent link