Daniel Richter @ Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg - "Mit elben Birnen" Exhibition

Daniel Richter: Mit elben Birnen

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg

Through 27 September 2025

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg presents a new series of paintings by German artist DANIEL RICHTER. Created over the past year, these large-scale works navigate a space between figuration and abstraction, characterised by chaotic entanglements of fragmented bodies. Creature-like forms are depicted against jagged fields of colour in bright, contrasting tones, evoking a sense of rebellious energy and electric vibrancy.

Daniel Richter’s painting has been marked by a continual formal transformation since the beginning of his career. While opaque, monochrome areas of colour characterised Richter’s work of the past few years, the backgrounds of these new, intensely colourful compositions appear torn or singed. At times, the candy-coloured shapes that seem to race across the canvas are delineated by black, dense lines; at others, they seem to detach from the background or erupt across the pictorial space.

In some works, the artist leaves behind traces of his physical presence as visible fingermarks on the canvas, intensifying a heightened sense of primordial energy and unresolved conflict. ‘The dynamic in my work is mainly based on pushing and shoving, or on elements that are being confronted by each other – mingling, pushing, pulling,’ Daniel Richter explains.

The temporal and spatial indeterminacy of scenes refuses to resolve into a coherent time, place, or even pictorial space. The works appear to depict surreal landscapes of the mind or imagination rather than representations of any external world. Colours clash or recede with intense emotional charge, the bold contrasts and abstract patterns recalling the formal vocabulary of Clyfford Still. And yet, despite the underlying violence, the works convey a touching sensuality and beauty that counterbalances their restless energy.

The exhibition’s title references the opening line of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem Half of Life, which Daniel Richter cryptically rephrases. The poem is centred around a stark contrast between idealised beauty and a world marked by emptiness. The lines, which sound almost prophetic in today’s political climate, accompanied Daniel Richter during the creation of this series. Hölderlin’s image of creaking weathervanes can be read as a symbol of the fragile, often fractured order of our time.

Friedrich Hölderlin

‘Half of Life’

With its yellow pears

And wild roses everywhere

The shore hangs into the lake,

O gracious swans,

And drunk with kisses

You dip your heads

In the sobering holy water.

Ah, where will I find

Flowers, come winter,

And where the sunshine

And shade of the earth?

Walls stand cold

And speechless, in the wind

The weathervanes creak.

The anarchic humour of his titles is typical of the artist, whose sensibility for the absurd and the drastic is also closely linked to the Hamburg music scene and punk. The city, where Daniel Richter studied under Werner Büttner from 1992 to 1996, has played a pivotal role in his life and career, serving as both a formative backdrop for his artistic development and a long-standing base from which he emerged as one of Germany’s most influential contemporary painters.

Artist Daniel Richter

Born in Eutin, Germany, Daniel Richter lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg from 1992–96 under Werner Büttner, and later worked as an assistant to Albert Oehlen. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of Richter’s work have been held at Kunsthalle Tübingen (2023); Space K, Seoul (2022); 21er Haus, Vienna (2017); Camden Arts Centre, London (2017); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2016); TAXISPALAIS Kunsthalle Tirol, Innsbruck (2014); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2014); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2011); CAC Málaga and Denver Art Museum (both 2008); Hamburger Kunsthalle (2007); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2005); and Kunsthalle Kiel; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2001).

Daniel Richter’s works are included in renowned collections worldwide, among them the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Hamburger Kunsthalle; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; the Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig; the Kunstmuseum Den Haag; the Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Denver Art Museum; and the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg. In 2023, the Oscar-winning director Pepe Danquart released the documentary Daniel Richter, offering a multifaceted insight into the artist’s life and work.

In December, a major retrospective will open at the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Schloss Gottorf (until February 2026).

THADDAEUS ROPAC SALZBURG

Salzburg Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg

ropac.net

Related Posts:

In English

Daniel Richter 

Kunsthalle Tübingen (2023)

Daniel Richter: Pink Flag – White Horse 

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2005)

En Français

Daniel Richter. Drapeau rose – Cheval blanc

Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa (2005)

Daniel Richter: Mit elben Birnen

Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg, 25 July — 27 September 2025

Eckart Hahn: Silence @ Pablo’s Birthday, New York

Eckart Hahn: Silence 

Pablo’s Birthday, New York

September 5 – October 10, 2025

Pablo’s Birthday presents Silence, an exhibition by German painter ECKART HAHN. After two decades of collaboration, this is the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery. Hahn’s practice combines elements of narrative and physical tension to explore paradoxical relationships and power dynamics, such as freedom/control, authenticity/artificiality, or isolation/connection. Through the representation of materiality, pressure, gravity, and restriction, he creates a synergy of form and semantics that aid in exploring these binaries. 

“Sight is effortless; sight requires spatial distance; sight can be turned off.”   

– Susan Sontag

Closed eyes link the cast of characters that Eckart Hahn brings to life; apes meditating with apples balanced on their heads and bullets between their toes, while Kermit raises up a skull, and a bird perches on a tower of stacked stones. The profile of a parrot faces us with its eyelids closed. In these contemplative poses, the gesture of looking away evokes both inner stillness and emotional retreat, while the precariousness of balanced objects becomes a metaphor for weight, gravity, strain. In these visual cues, Eckart Hahn uncovers a deeper psychological tension: the burden of moral ambiguity and the delicate negotiation between personal preservation and collective responsibility.

Susan Sontag writes, “In a modern life–a life in which there is a superfluity of things to which we are invited to pay attention–it seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad.” Susan Sontag emphasizes the human reaction to a constant carousel of thoughts displayed through the everyday, unceasing newsreel. Hahn unveils this tension: When does self-care become neglect? When does self-care shield us not only from harm but from responsibility, connection, and empathy? In reverse, when does a lack of self-care contribute to a deadening of feeling resulting in cynicism or apathy? 

In Hahn’s paintings, we see both a coping mechanism and disengagement, a focus on the self and a shutting out from the world. Hahn raises the question of whether, in shielding ourselves, we risk severing the very qualities that make us human. But Hahn doesn’t offer resolution; rather, he sustains contradiction. He asks us to sit with it, to feel its pull, and its discomfort. 

ECKART HAHN (b. 1971) attended Eberhardt Karl University and the Johannes Gutenberg School in Stuttgart. His works have been represented in solo and group institutional exhibitions and are featured in numerous collections worldwide. Accompanying the publication of his monograph, "Der schwarze Hund trägt bunt" 2018, were three museum exhibitions at Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin; Neue Galerie Gladbeck, Gladbeck; and Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden. In summer 2025, Eckart Hahn presents a retrospective of over 50 works at the Museum Villa Zanders, Bergisch Gladbach, Germany. He currently lives and works near Stuttgart, Germany.

PABLO'S BIRTHDAY

105 Hudson Street, # 410, New York, NY 10013

pablosbirthday.com

Charline von Heyl @ The George Economou Collection, Marousi / Athens - "The Giddy Road to Ruin" Exhibition

Charline von Heyl 

The Giddy Road to Ruin

The George Economou Collection, Marousi / Athens

14 June 2025 – March 2026

Charline von Heyl 

The Giddy Road to Ruin, 2015

Acrylic on canvas, 62 x 54 inches (157.5 x 137 cm)

© Charline von Heyl

Courtesy of Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Petzel New York

Photo: Butcher Walsh

The George Economou Collection presents The Giddy Road to Ruin, the first survey exhibition by German-American artist CHARLINE VON HEYL (b. 1960) in Greece. 

Across three floors of gallery space, The Giddy Road to Ruin features select works from the last several decades. The earliest is an outstanding painting from the George Economou Collection—an emblematic example of the artist’s practice—Untitled (11/93, I) (1993), while the most recent is her first-ever photographic work, Athens, made in 2024.

The title of the exhibition, The Giddy Road to Ruin, derives from her 2015 painting of the same name and may be interpreted as a reflection of her thinking as well as the nature of painting itself. Displayed at the exhibition’s beginning and considered within the context of Greece’s ancient and modern landscape, the painting takes on greater significance, especially in relation to its presentation alongside the Athens (2024) collages. In these graphic images we experience the echoes and rumblings of both the present and history.

Charline von Heyl is one of the most significant painters of her generation. Educated in Germany in the 1980s and inspired by both senior artists and contemporaries—including Martin Kippenberger, Rosemarie Trockel, and Michael Krebber, as well as Albert Oehlen, Jutta Koether, and Cosima von Bonin—her work began to carve out new territory, particularly after her move to New York in 1996. While her paintings share the rigor and intensity of theirs, Charline von Heyl’s work eschews irony in favor of a more openly amused humor and a certain nimbleness in the synthesis of mind and hand.

Once in the United States, Charline von Heyl developed a novel, constructive, and strategic approach to creating and solving artistic problems that allows each painting to be “a self-generating machine that finds its own soul.” Her work is neither wholly abstract nor representational but simultaneously both. Her art succeeds by embracing visual and conceptual contradictions, keeping viewers intrigued by the seemingly impossible combinations of subjects, compositions, and styles that result in deeply satisfying yet puzzling works. In many of her paintings, forms appear both in stasis and in flux simultaneously, as evident in works such as Demons Dance Alone (2022) or World Rabbit Clock (2022). Shapes seem to be concurrently at the fore and in the background, as seen in her depiction of bowling pins—a recurring image in her vocabulary, particularly well-represented in two paintings from 2015 on mid-twentieth-century barkcloth fabric that are located on the second floor of the exhibition. To the indiscriminate eye, the contradictory styles in von Heyl’s paintings might seem irreconcilable, yet they all coexist within the singularly coherent universe of her art.

While a series of four densely composed paintings on barkcloth are a through line from the first floor, the appearance of two stolid and iconic works on the second floor signal a change of mood in the exhibition. The heraldic devices in Untitled (11/93, I) (1993) carry ominous, even militaristic overtones, in contrast to the insouciant black-and-white cut-out shapes of Time Waiting (2010), which harken back to mid-century travel advertisements’ filtered interpretation of Cubism. These works stand in stark contrast to the owl paintings from 2020–2021, in which the generally solitary birds—symbols of good fortune and wisdom—gather, against type, into a multitude. This capacious theme, with its potential for great and even adorable variation, offered a lighthearted interlude for Charline von Heyl to paint and for the viewer to enjoy encountering the third floor of the exhibition.

Here the opening salvo is a boldly blue bird in the large, rectangular painting Animal Delinquency (2021). Ultramarine fowl are partially obscured by two smudged-out, variegated forms of two other creatures—owls, perhaps? The collapse of subjects and the spaces they inhabit creates an apprehensive experience. The scroll-like structure of Banish Air from Air (2017) also features bird-like forms flying through interlocking patterns of words, lines, and shapes. At its center is a variation of her repeated, defiant yet playful female power figure, also seen in The Giddy Road to Ruin.

The painting Ninfa (2021) continues the subtle theme of feminine power in her work. Pulchritude is rendered as outlandish, with blue lips and a graceful line suggesting a chin overtaken by a coalescence of black and ochre biomorphic forms resembling birds. The head itself transforms into a dense field of patterns, becoming increasingly abstract. The fifteen diverse, rigorous while and whimsical black-and-white drawings that comprise Drawings Group 2 (2006) elaborate on and connect to the inscriptive elements—sometimes appearing as ideograms or Rorschach-like forms— not unlike Banish Air from Air. They also echo the structure and palette of Athens earlier in the exhibition. Each work on view is replete with such recursive connections, dissonances, and discontinuities—eye-opening and mind-boggling revelations await.

Charline von Heyl: The Giddy Road to Ruin is co-curated by Adam D. Weinberg and Skarlet Smatana, the director of The George Economou Collection, in close collaboration with the artist. A publication with essays by Adam D. Weinberg and artist Helen Marten accompanies the exhibition.

THE GEORGE ECONOMOU COLLECTION

80 Kifissias Ave, 15125 Marousi, Athens

www.thegeorgeeconomoucollection.com

Stephan Balkenhol @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

Stephan Balkenhol

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki 

August 22 – September 21, 2025

The minimalist sculptures of German artist Stephan Balkenhol radiate a quiet, archaic power. Though his figures often assume formal poses and wear expressionless faces, they are anything but detached. Instead, they convey a restrained yet compelling intensity. Balkenhol’s primary focus is the human condition—whether his subjects are actual people or animals dressed in human clothing, they serve as reflections of humanity. He deliberately preserves the visible marks of his carving tools, giving each figure a tactile roughness that underscores its vulnerability. Sculpted from a single block of wood—typically soft poplar or Douglas fir—each work embraces natural cracks and coarse textures, foregrounding the imperfections that define what it means to be human.

Stephan Balkenhol is widely recognized as one of today’s foremost contemporary sculptors. In the early 1980s, he broke away from the dominant abstract and conceptual art movements of the time, turning instead toward figurative expression. Since then, the human form—and the existential questions it evokes—has remained central to his practice. While clearly representational, Balkenhol’s works resist literal interpretation, inviting viewers into open-ended encounters.

Stephan Balkenhol (b. 1957) studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg and has served as a professor at the Akademie für Bildende Künste in Karlsruhe since 1992. His sculptures are held in major international collections, including the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, Kunsthalle Hamburg, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Karlsruhe, Kassel, and Berlin, as well as in Meisenthal, France.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

André Butzer @ Skarstedt, NYC - Chelsea

André Butzer

Skarstedt, New York

Through April 26, 2025

Skarstedt presents the first solo exhibition with acclaimed German painter André Butzer. Made specifically for the gallery’s new Chelsea space, he has created 10 large-scale paintings as well as 15 works on paper.

Since 1994, in direct succession to Georg Baselitz and Albert Oehlen, André Butzer’s fundamental fusion of European Expressionism and American ready-made pop culture, the conceptual repetition and apparent seriality of his iconic characters as well as his insistence on bare human dignity have been testament to his courageous and continuous inquiry into societal contradictions and social non-conformity.

Butzer’s Synthetic Paintings appear to be blasted and contorted, atomized into countless abstract particles. No painting can rely on any prefabricated compositional order. Enormous discharges of colors, forms and patches, ornamental bands, framework and planes—placeless and unstable.

The huge, solitary figures, as austere as ludicrous, are a challenge to our image of man. Their towering, composite bodies are industrialized, permeated by technology, maltreated by devices and pieces of apparatus, distorted, destroyed from within.

But at that precarious moment, in which the human figure is completely negated, dissolved, broken, and hollowed out, André Butzer begins. In the face of absolute annihilation, nothing remains but mere existence. An enduring basis for living. Vibrant and vital. From there, he builds his figures and thus the entire image anew.

For a figure is nothing that ever was a given in painting. Unique and inimitable, it incorporates both creation and destruction, permanent obliteration and renewal. André Butzer decisively realizes the substantial coherence of these opposites. "I want to be right in the middle of these destructive and redemptive contradictions", he says. In every image, opposites such as placing and dispersion, disruption and solidity, affirmation and negation reunite and therefore converge into a balanced, all-encompassing wholeness.

Each painting establishes its own, fragile stance from within itself. The straightening up of the figures, their presence and posture, their foothold and powerless composure, all this corresponds to the pervasive verticality of the canvases like an echo. A painterly totality, in which color transfigures every form and body.

The entire painting becomes a coloristically built “pictorial figure,” which “has no validity outside the picture and which is only potent in this one image and on this specific plane.” A trembling, truthful image of man, made whole again amidst fracturing and dissolving. Just as Butzer’s figures suddenly fit into the image, it is as if, even we, might fit into the world again.

André Butzer confronts our frail existence. His paintings reveal with utmost urgency that a dignified life, the integrity of body and soul, must be preserved not only in painting, but everywhere all at once.

SKARSTEDT NEW YORK - CHELSEA

547 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.skarstedt.com

André Butzer @ Skarstedt, New York, February 13 - April 26, 2025

Thomas Demand @ Taipei Fine Arts Museum - "The Stutter of History" Retrospective Exhibition

Thomas Demand 

The Stutter of History

Taipei Fine Arts Museum

January 18 — May 11, 2025

THOMAS DEMAND 

The Stutter of History - Exhibition Poster

「托瑪斯．德曼：歷史的結舌」展覽主視覺。

Courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum

“I guess the core of it is making the world into a model by redoing it and stripping off the anecdotal part, that’s when it becomes an allegory, and the project becomes a metaphor. Making models is a cultural technique—without it we would be blind.”

—Thomas Demand

The retrospective of celebrated German artist Thomas Demand is on view at Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). The exhibition is co-organized by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, and TFAM, curated by Douglas Fogle. It brings together nearly 70 of the artist's works from the 1990s to the present, showcasing his 30-year practice at the intersection of sculpture and photography.

Born in Munich in 1964, Thomas Demand studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich and the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts from 1987 to 1992, and earned a master's degree in fine arts from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 1994. Initially, Thomas Demand simply created sculptures with paper and cardboard, while photography originally served as a means to document his works. During the shooting process, he discovered the differences between the physical objects and their flat images captured by the camera lens, leading him to develop a method of constructing objects for the purpose of being photographed. This has subsequently become the primary medium for presenting his creations. Demand reconstructs life-size scenes of seemingly banal images from the mass media using paper and cardboard, and then photograph the scenes to create images similar to the originals. Finally, he destroys the models, leaving behind only large-format photographic prints. In this way, he questions the notion of photography as an absolutely objective or truthful medium and explores the distance between reality and representation. Demand's works have been exhibited in major museums and galleries worldwide. He represented Germany at the 26th São Paulo Biennial (2004), and appeared four times at the Venice Architecture Biennale. In light of his love for models and architecture, it is not surprising that Demand has collaborated over the years with various well-known international architects such as David Chipperfield, Rem Koolhaas, and SANAA, on projects ranging from exhibitions and installations to actual architectural building projects.

The topics of Demand's works often come from news photos of notable historical or social incidents, recreating key moments that have influenced Western or even global situations. His early works address moments of German history that he never personally experienced but learned about through images, such as the bomb-damaged room where Hitler narrowly escaped assassination in 1944 (Raum / Room, 1994), and the film archives of the Nazi-supported filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (Archiv / Archive, 1995). Additionally, Thomas Demand has reconstructed scenes of major world news events, such as the stack of documents at Donald Trump's press conference before his inauguration as U.S. President in 2017 to prove that he had relinquished control of his businesses (Folders, 2017), the hotel room where the fugitive American National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden originally stayed in Russia (Refuge Series, 2021), the storeroom of the Wildenstein Institute, where 30 paintings and sculptures that had been missing for decades were recovered during a police raid (Vault, 2012), and the abandoned control room of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in the aftermath of Japan’s 2011 Tōhoku earthquake (Kontrollraum / Control Room, 2011).

Throughout his career, Thomas Demand has been interested in our culture’s production and interpretation of “nature,” as well as the division between the artificial and natural worlds. Using over 270,000 paper leaves, he created Clearing (2003), an idyllic forest scene with sunlight streaming through the canopy, reflecting people's unfounded romantic vision of a pure and pristine nature. His work Grotte / Grotto (2006) was made with 36 tons of cardboard. The artist gathered and studied hundreds of postcards of caves sold in gift shops worldwide and built a life-sized grotto with stalactites accumulated over thousands of years. The final photographic version of Grotto becomes an ideal condensation of our collective impression of a cave. This is the only model among Demand's works that has been preserved and is currently on view at the Prada Foundation in Milan. The wall-covering photographic wallpaper work Hanami (2014), which has been installed across the entrance walls of the TFAM’s exhibition galleries, provides viewers with an immersive experience. By recreating countless cherry blossoms out of paper, Demand invites us to contemplate on the fleeting and cyclical nature of life through their ephemeral bloom.

In 2008, Thomas Demand moved from the monumental to personal and quotidian subjects, creating his Dailies series. The artist still employed the same creative methods, transforming images into paper sculptures and then photographing them. However, this series of images came from mobile phone snapshots of banal scenes he encountered daily, such as an empty yogurt cup with a pink plastic spoon left on a shelf, a bar of soap placed on the edge of a sink, a pile of letters spilling out from under a door, and cups inserted into the holes of a chain link fence. The Dailies series is Demand's attempt at creating an autobiographical narrative using ordinary visual elements, and celebrates the subtle and infinite charm of life's minutiae. These works condense his understanding of history: history is not only composed of grand events worldwide but also includes the mundane matters of our individual lives. In light of the popularization of phone-based photographic technology and our culture’s now obsessive sharing of images on social media, the artist's painstaking reproduction of these poetic if unremarkable moments from his own life in his Dailies also asks us to reflect on the outsized importance that these rapidly produced and disseminated images have taken on in contemporary society.

Thomas Demand has also used stop-motion animation in his work to explore the world of moving images. In Pacific Sun (2012), the artist recreated a piece of surveillance camera footage that went viral on the internet depicting a few moments inside a cruise ship cabin as it was hit by rogue waves from a tropical storm off the coast of New Zealand. In this film we see tables, chairs, lockers, paper plates, computer monitors, and other objects slide back and forth whimsically and erratically. Thomas Demand spent months meticulously recreating these chaotic moments frame by frame with paper and cardboard. In Balloons (2018), a string of balloons tied to a red plastic clothespin drifts slowly across a concrete and brick sidewalk, moved lazily by the wind. Only the clothespin and colorful ribbons are visible on the screen, while the balloons themselves float outside the frame, their looming presence marked only by the shadows cast on the ground, moving gracefully as if dancing to an improvised minuet. Accompanied by swaying tree shadows and occasionally by fallen leaves on the ground, the work captures poetic moments of urban life that are often overlooked and incidental.

In 2011, during his residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, Thomas Demand began his Model Studies series. Departing from his technique of sculpturally reconstructing existing images of the world, he turned his lens directly on the preparatory paper models of architects and designers, capturing abstract and fragmented elements within them. Whether it was the provisional maquettes of John Lautner, one of the most influential modernist architects in 20th-century America, those created by contemporary architectural firms like SANAA, or the radical paper dress patterns of the fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa, who was famous for his sculptural designs, these images reveal that the world around us is constructed on a foundation of paper. During his exploration of building environments in the visual world, Demand began using his photographic prints as wallpaper to intervene in white cube spaces, adding a spatial depth to the exhibition of his photographic works, as seen in Cones (2018) and Lockers (2018), which fill the walls of two rooms of the exhibition.

Through the ingenious use of paper as a material and the arrangement of light and shadow, Demand's works initially appear similar to documentary images of the real world, but upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be recreations using paper and cardboard. Based on flat documentary images, Thomas Demand carefully re-construct these scenes out of paper before photographing the models and finally destroying them. Through layers of reproduction and translation between his source images and their final quasi-photographic counterparts, Demand’s ghostly works suggest that even though history lurks in our collective and individual memories in the form of images, there is always a gap in our perception of the so-called truth. Demand's work explores how the fragile texture of paper can become the carrier of images and memories, whether from our daily lives or the larger arc of world historical events. This aspect of Demand’s work highlights the tension between photographic images and the real world while questioning both the inertia of image culture and the paradox of perception.

THOMAS DEMAND (b. 1964, Munich, lives and works in Berlin) attended both the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 1987 to 1992 before receiving a master’s degree in fine arts from Goldsmiths’ College in London in 1994. Thomas Demand has shown his work at major museums and galleries worldwide. His solo projects include exhibitions at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2024); Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume (2023); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (2022); Centro Botin, Santander (2021); Garage, Moscow (2021); M Museum, Leuven (2020); Fondazione Prada, Venice (2017, 2007); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2016); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014, 2015); DHC Art Center, Montréal (2013); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2012); the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2012); Kaldor Public Arts Project #25, Sydney (2012); Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2010); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2009); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2009); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2006); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005); the Kunsthaus Bregenz (2004); and a survey at Fondation Cartier, Paris (2001). He also represented Germany at the 26th Sao Paulo Biennale (2004). His widely acclaimed exhibition “The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied.,” a collaboration with the filmmaker Alexander Kluge and the stage and costume designer Anna Viebrock, was on view at Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2017. His work has been included in four iterations of the Venice Architecture Biennale and was recently featured at the 2nd Chicago Architecture Biennale. His work is represented in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Tate Modern, London. Thomas Demand has also curated several shows, including “L’Image Volée” at Fondazione Prada (Milan, 2016); “Model Studies” (Graham Foundation, Chicago, 2013); “La carte d’après nature” (Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Monaco, (2010); and a contribution to the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, “Common Ground” (2012)

TAPEI FINE ARTS MUSEUM — TFAM

No.181, Sec. 3, Zhongshan N. Rd., Zhongshan Dist., Taipei City 104227

www.tfam.museum

Caspar David Friedrich @ Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC - "The Soul of Nature" Exhibition with Catalogue

Caspar David Friedrich 

The Soul of Nature

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

February 8 - May 11, 2025

Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840)

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, ca. 1817

Oil on canvas, 37 3/8 × 29 1/2 in. (94.8 × 74.8 cm)

Hamburger Kunsthalle, on permanent

loan from the Stiftung Hamburger

Kunstsammlungen, acquired 1970 (HK-5161)

Photo by Elke Walford

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)

Self-Portrait, 1800

Black chalk on wove paper

16 9/16 x 10 7/8 in. / 42 x 27.6 cm

SMK, National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen

(KKSgb5006)

Photo credit: Statens Museum for Kunst

The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States dedicated to Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). Friedrich’s art presents nature as a site of personal and philosophical discovery. Marshalling the expressive power of perspective, light, color, and atmosphere, the artist created landscapes that articulate a profound connection between the natural world and the inner self, or soul. This imagery encapsulated the newly emerging ideals of European Romanticism, a cultural revolution that championed conceptions of individual perception and feeling that are still vital today.

“The most significant German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich brilliantly illuminates our understanding of the natural world as a spiritual and emotional landscape,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “This very first major retrospective in the United States of Germany’s most beloved painter follows the celebrations of Friedrich’s work in Europe on the occasion of the artist’s 250th birthday in 2024. We are thrilled to collaborate with our German museum colleagues and many other generous lenders on this rare opportunity to reflect on Friedrich’s portrayals of nature and the human condition.”

The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Alte Nationalgalerie of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, which house the most substantial collections of Friedrich’s work in the world. In 2023–24, these museums presented hugely popular exhibitions of Friedrich’s art as part of the artist’s jubilee celebrations in Germany. As a capstone to this series of shows, The Met’s exhibition features unprecedented loans from all three institutions and from more than 30 other public and private lenders in Europe and North America, many never before seen in the United States. Despite Friedrich’s celebrated reputation, there have been only two exhibitions dedicated to his work in the United States: The Romantic Vision of Caspar David Friedrich: Paintings and Drawings from the U.S.S.R., held at The Met and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1990–91 and featuring 9 paintings and 11 works on paper by Friedrich; and Caspar David Friedrich: Moonwatchers, held at The Met in 2001, which included 7 paintings and 2 works on paper by the artist.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)

View of Arkona with Rising Moon, 1805–6

Brown ink and wash, over pencil, on wove paper

24 x 39 3/8 in. / 60.9 x 100 cm

The Albertina Museum, Vienna (17298)

Photo credit: The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna

Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840)

Two Men Contemplating the Moon, ca. 1825–30

Oil on canvas, 13 3/4 x 17 1/4 in. / 34.9 x 43.8 cm

The Metropolitan Museum of Art,

Wrightsman Fund, 2000 (2000.51)

Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature presents oil paintings, finished drawings, and working sketches from every phase of the artist’s career, along with select examples by his contemporaries. The selection illuminates Caspar David Friedrich’s development of a symbolic vocabulary of landscape motifs to convey the personal and existential meanings that he discovered in nature. Among the loans that are exhibited for the first time in the United States are Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Hamburger Kunsthalle) and Monk by the Sea (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie), two of Friedrich’s most famous paintings and icons of Romantic art. Many other signature works, such as Dolmen in Autumn (Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden), have not been seen in the United States for decades. The exhibition also brings together for the first time all five of the Caspar David Friedrich paintings owned by museums in the United States (The Met, the Kimbell Art Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Saint Louis Art Museum), placing these rare American holdings in the broader context of Friedrich’s art. A rich selection of works on paper from domestic and international collections showcases Friedrich’s talents as a draftsman and the centrality of drawing to his creative practice. As a joint project between specialists in paintings and drawings, the exhibition  also considers the ways that the artist worked across media and how different materials and techniques shaped his style.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)

Castle Ruins at Teplitz, 1828

Watercolor over pencil on wove paper

6 13/16 x 9 ¼ in. / 17.3 x 23.4 cm

Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen 

Dresden (C 1913-33)

Photo credit: © Kupferstich-Kabinett, 

Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 

Photo by Herbert Boswank

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)

The Evening Star, ca. 1830

Oil on canvas, 13 x 17 13/16 in. (33 x 45.2 cm)

Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurter Goethe Museum, 

Frankfurt am Main (IV-1950-007)

Photo credit: © Freies Deutsches Hochstift / 

Frankfurter Goethe-Museum

Photo: David Hall

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)

Cave in the Harz, ca. 1837

Brown ink and wash with pencil on wove paper

13 9/16 x 17 3/16 in. / 34.5 x 43.7 cm

The Royal Danish Collection, Copenhagen (I, 3 a-3)

Photo credit: HM The King's Reference Library, 

The Royal Danish Collection

The exhibition unfolds chronologically and thematically, tracing Friedrich’s portrayal of the landscape of northern and central Europe over his four-decade career, which coincided with pronounced symbolic and physical changes to the land—prompted by the rise of Romantic thought, scientific discoveries about the earth, nascent industrialization, and political upheaval, most notably the Napoleonic Wars of 1803–1815. Each section of the exhibition examines specific landscape motifs and pictorial strategies that defined Friedrich’s art, while highlighting the themes that he explored, among them spirituality and religion; the experience of the infinite and unknowable; the passage of time and mortality; solitude and companionship in nature; the juxtaposition of the familiar and the unknown; and the mixture of beauty and danger that the Romantics called the sublime. As a whole, the exhibition  distills Caspar David Friedrich’s vision of nature and situate his art within the tumultuous politics and vibrant culture of 19th-century German society, illuminating the role of German Romanticism in shaping modern perceptions of the natural world.

Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature is co-curated by Alison Hokanson (Curator, Department of European Paintings, The Met), and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein (Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Met).

Caspar David Friedrich 

The Soul of Nature

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition. It features essays by Dr. Hokanson and Dr. Seidenstein; Professor Joseph Leo Koerner, Harvard University; and Professor Cordula Grewe, Indiana University; in addition to contributions from other international scholars. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art it is distributed by Yale University Press.

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 199

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

www.metmuseum.org

Gerold Miller @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

Gerold Miller

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

January 17 – February 16, 2025

Now exhibiting in Finland for the first time, GEROLD MILLER is a German sculptor known for his minimalistic, geometric works exploring intersections of space, form, and perception. His practice revolves around space and time, stagnancy and movement, subject and object, with the viewer becoming merged an an integral part of the artwork. His art is distinctive for its precision, clean lines, and the use of industrial materials such as aluminium and lacquer. It blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture, challenging traditional distinctions and thus inviting the viewer into a dialogue with the visual experience.

The sculptures and wall reliefs featured in the exhibition represent a reduced notion of pictoriality, a key role being played by their placement in time and space. Much depends on the viewer’s perspective in the space and how they position themselves in relation to the work. The merging of the sculpture and the viewer is an ever-evolving process: when encountering Miller’s works, the viewer can experience the world as being simultaneously mirrored and real, while themselves occupying both simulated and real space. In this way, Miller interweaves space and time, stagnancy and movement, subject and object, viewer and sculpture, as a holistically integrated artwork.

GEROLD MILLER (b. 1961) studied sculpture at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design, graduating in 1989. His work has been exhibited and is held in museums and private collections around the world, including the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, NOMA New Orleans Museum of Art in the United States, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in Germany, Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Takasaki Museum of Art in Japan, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris, the Musée de l’Art et de la Histoire Neuchâtel in Switzerland, and the Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Italy.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki 

www.galerieforsblom.com

Anselm Kiefer - Exhibitions in Amsterdam @ Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam: "Sag mir wo die Blumen sind"

Anselm Kiefer - Sag mir wo die Blumen sind

Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

7 March – 9 June 2025

Anselm Kiefer, Sag mir wo die Blumen sind (2024), 

installation view at studio, Croissy, France.

Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, sediment of electrolysis, 

clay, dried flowers, straw, fabric, steel, charcoal and 

collage of canvas on canvas.

Copyright: Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Nina Slavcheva

Anselm Kiefer, De sterrennacht (2019)

470 x 840 cm, emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, straw, gold leaf,

wood, wire, sediment of an electrolysis on canvas

Copyright: Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Georges Poncet

A major new immersive painting installation by Anselm Kiefer will form the centerpiece of a landmark exhibition of the artist’s work in Amsterdam. For the first time in their history, the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam are joining forces to stage the exhibition Anselm Kiefer - Sag mir wo die Blumen sind.

The exhibition brings together twenty-five works by Anselm Kiefer, including paintings, installations, film and works on paper, across the two museums. The presentation at the Van Gogh Museum will demonstrate the enduring influence of Vincent van Gogh on Kiefer’s work. In 1963, Kiefer won a travel scholarship and chose to follow the route taken by Van Gogh, from the Netherlands to Belgium and France. Van Gogh and his work have remained a vital source of inspiration for him.  

Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows, (1890)

50.5 cm x 103 cm, oil on canvas

Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

The exhibition presents seven key works by Vincent Van Gogh, alongside previously unseen paintings and thirteen early drawings by Kiefer. Paintings, such as Van Gogh’s Wheatfeld With Crows (1890) will be juxtaposed in the same space as Kiefer’s monumental works of the same theme. 

Emilie Gordenker, Director, Van Gogh Museum, said: “Anselm Kiefer has been engaged with Van Gogh’s work from his early years. Sometimes the inspiration is almost literal, as in the use of sunflowers and the composition of his landscapes. Kiefer’s recent work – displayed here for the first time – shows how Van Gogh continues to make his mark on his work today.” 

Anselm Kiefer, Innenraum (1981)

287.5 x 311 cm, oil, acrylic and paper on canvas

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

Anselm Kiefer, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1990)

239 x 750 x 750 cm, lead, glass, mixed media

and Untitled (1989)

340 x 501 x 100 cm, lead, lime, chalk and salt on wood.

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

The presentation at the Stedelijk Museum focuses on Anselm Kiefer’s close ties to the Netherlands, particularly the artist’s connection with the museum, which has been pivotal to his career. The Stedelijk acquired Innenraum (1981) and Märkischer Sand (1982) early in the artist’s practice and staged an acclaimed solo exhibition of his work in 1986. This exhibition is not only an unprecedented opportunity to see all the works in the Stedelijk’s collection together, but also a chance to see Anselm Kiefer’s more recent paintings and especially two new spatial installations. The titular work Sag mir wo die Blumen sind is an immersive painting installation of more than 24 meters long, which the artist is currently completing to fill the space around the historic staircase of the museum. The second installation Steigend, steigend, sinke nieder is made from photographs and lead, an important material that recurs throughout Anselm Kiefer’s work, alluding to the heavy weight of human history. The exhibition will also feature films by and about Anselm Kiefer, including the unknown film Noch ist Polen nicht verloren (1989), which he made in Warsaw shortly before the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Rein Wolfs, Director, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, said: “The Stedelijk has a long relationship with Anselm Kiefer and has played an important role in the acceptance of the artist’s work. That connection will be expressed in the two special spatial installations he will show in our building, and which will be an immersive experience. It will be truly remarkable to see these installations amid several of his iconic works from the 1980s. In this way, Kiefer looks back at the past and towards the future.” 

SAG MIR WO DIE BLUMEN SIND

The title of the exhibition Sag mir wo die Blumen sind is taken from the 1955 protest song Where have all the flowers gone by American folk singer and activist Pete Seeger, which became famous when Marlene Dietrich performed the song in 1962. Anselm Kiefer’s expansive new installation for the Stedelijk Museum Sag mir wo die Blumen sind combines paint and clay with uniforms, dried rose petals and gold, symbolising the cycle of life and death with the human condition and fate of mankind playing a central motif. The flowers of the title are also a reference to the Sunflowers (1889) by Vincent van Gogh and to recent landscapes by Anselm Kiefer, which will be seen for the first time in the exhibition.

Portrait of Anselm Kiefer

Photo by Summer Taylor

From left to right: Edwin Becker and Emilie Gordenker

(respectively Curator and Director, Van Gogh Museum),

Anselm Kiefer, Rein Wolfs and Leontine Coelewij

(respectively Director and Curator, Stedelijk Museum

Amsterdam), April 2024. Photo: Tomek Dersu Aaron

ANSELM KIEFER (b. 1945, Donaueschingen, Germany) was born in the closing months of World War II, and as a boy he played in the debris of post-war Germany. In the late 1960s, Anselm Kiefer was one of the first German artists to address the country’s fraught history in monumental, acerbic works for which he sustained intense criticism in his homeland. In the Netherlands, his work first gained recognition among collectors and museums like the Stedelijk. Later, Kiefer would be hailed for breaking the silence surrounding Germany’s past. His work reflects on themes such as history, mythology, philosophy, literature, alchemy, and landscape. 

Van Gogh Museum 

Museumplein 6, 1071 DJ Amsterdam

www.vangoghmuseum.nl

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 

Museumplein 10, 1071 DJ Amsterdam

www.stedelijk.nl

Staatsgalerie Stuttgart: This is Tomorrow - The 20th / 21st Century Collection: New Presentation

THIS IS TOMORROW

The 20th / 21st Century Collection:

New Presentation 

Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

19 July 2024 – 31 December 2025

ULRIKE OTTINGER

Maison clouée du papillon, 1965

Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

Acquired in 2021 with funds from the

Museumsstiftung Baden-Württemberg

© Ulrike Ottinger

Spreading out in six major rooms devoted to the display of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart collection, the presentation THIS IS TOMORROW features contemporary pieces side by side with prominent examples of twentieth century art. Representing a wide range of mediums, they are works that take a critical look at the body, examine identity issues and social coexistence, explore the relationship between nature and artificial intelligence, process experiences of war and violence, and more. With its abundance of installations, paintings, media artworks, sculptures, and works on paper—more than 100 objects in all—, the new presentation is intended to spark discourse on themes of especial relevance for society today.

Works by such artists as Eleanor Antin, Marcel Duchamp, Katharina Fritsch, Hannah Höch, Käthe Kollwitz, Jeff Koons, Joseph Kosuth, Maria Lassnig, Yoko Ono, and Andy Warhol enter into dialogue with numerous new acquisitions and gifts of the past years, including examples by Nobert Bisky, Burhan Doğançay, Teresa Margolles, Ulrike Ottinger, Cindy Sherman, Hito Steyerl, Haegue Yang, and many others. Works by Clément Cogitore, Simone Leigh, Anys Reimann, Deborah Roberts, and Ben Willikens on loan from the ScharpffStriebich Collection, the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, and the Weishaupt Collection further enhance the selection.

STAATSGALERIE STUTTGART

Konrad-Adenauer-Str. 30, 70173 Stuttgart

www.staatsgalerie.de 

Kunstverein Hannover Award Winners Exhibition - Ole Blank, Lena Marie Emrich, Pablo Schlumberger, Tugba Simsek, Catharina Szonn @ Kunstverein Hannover

Kunstverein Hannover Award Exhibition

Ole Blank, Lena Marie Emrich, 

Pablo Schlumberger, Tuğba Şimşek, 

Catharina Szonn

Kunstverein Hannover 

August 24 — October 6, 2024 

Kunstverein Hannover has been running a residency program for young artists for over 40 years. At the end of the program, their newly created works are shown in an exhibition at Kunstverein Hannover - this time not by three artists as usual, but by five.

The one- and two-year scholarships, which have been awarded since 1983, support artistic development both through project funding and by providing living and working space. The Kunstverein Hannover Award, with its regional and national focus, is supported by the Kunstverein Hannover, whose premises are made available to the scholarship holders for a final exhibition.

Information on the artists and the works on display

PABLO SCHLUMBERGER

In his artistic practice, Pablo Schlumberger (born 1990 in Aachen, lives and works in Düsseldorf) draws on various (art) historical epochs as well as high and pop culture. His works in the fields of sculpture, drawing, painting, installation and media art deal with the question of representation and perception in a humorous way. After completing his studies at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts in 2018 under Andreas Slominski, his works have been shown in Cologne, Münster, Hamburg and Varese (Italy), among others. In 2023 he received the Neustart Plus scholarship from the Stiftung Kunstfonds. In 2020 he was a fellow of the Residence NRW+ program in Münster and received the Kunstverein Hannover Award. 

Pablo Schlumberger 

Die Enthüllung (Messerwerfer), 2024 

Oil and pastel on canvas, 200 × 180 cm, detail

Courtesy of the artist

Pablo Schlumberger 

Die Enthüllung (Messerwerfer), 2024 

Oil and pastel on canvas, 200 × 180 cm, detail

Courtesy of the artist

Pablo Schlumberger 

Die Enthüllung (Messerwerfer), 2024 

Oil and pastel on canvas, 220 × 180 cm, detail

Courtesy of the artist

Pablo Schlumberger 

Sketch, 2024 

Courtesy of the artist

As if he had just escaped from the circus ring, the Messerwerfer (knife-thrower) performs on stages in several exhibition spaces at the Kunstverein. Confrontational and playful at the same time, the figure establishes a connection to the outside world. The stages appear staged and artificial, the double staging in the exhibition space takes on an initially absurd appearance. In a combination of painting and installation, an absurd profession seems to be addressed, that of an entertainer, a showman - humorously displayed here in all its irony.

TUGBA SIMSEK

Tuğba Şimşek (born 1986 in Grünstadt, lives and works in Hanover) draws on lived experiences, feelings, fragments of memory, places and everyday observations in their contradictory nature. She studied at the Braunschweig University of Art, where she graduated in 2019 as a master student of Olav Christopher Jenssen. She also studied at the Freie Kunstakademie Mannheim, the Metropolitan University of Art and Design Cardiff and the Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles. Tuğba Şimşek's work has been presented in numerous exhibitions, and in 2022 she received the Kunstverein Hannover Award. She has been awarded various scholarships, including Atelier auf Zeit, Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim (2021).

Tuğba Şimşek 

o. T., 2024 

MDF, blackboard paint, chalk, 34 × 26 × 1 cm

Tuğba Şimşek 

Mosaics (from the series Himalaya), 2023–2024 

Wood and small, hand-cut mosaic stones, 33.5 × 26 × 1 cm

Tuğba Şimşek records what she perceives in her surroundings casually, sometimes with her eyes closed, but always intuitively. Drawing has become a habit for her, a diary - a natural sequence of movements. In her new installation at the Kunstverein, the black circles on the walls look like targets - and the powdery colors provided look like an invitation: visitors are invited to participate in a large chalk painting and to see the black targets as deep wells of happiness into which something is thrown. The collective process leads to a joint product that is left to change and chance. Elsewhere, Tetris bricks - based on childhood memories - seem to glide across a huge, jet-black blackboard wall: the paused representation of a video game that stands for the childhood and youth of an entire generation. At the same time, childhood is the stage of life in which lack of intention, whether in play or in boredom, drives one's own creative work. The combination of biographical elements, subconscious images and involuntary action are brought together in Tuğba Şimşek's working method.

CATHARINA SZONN

Catharina Szonn (born 1987, Großenhain) studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach, the Iceland Academy of Arts Reykjavik and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In her expansive installations, she poetically questions and updates the relationship between man and machine, progress and transience. Her artistic practice touches on philosophical themes and integrates text and language. Catharina Szonn has taken part in exhibition projects such as the European Media Art Festival Osnabrück (2019) and has shown her work in solo exhibitions in Amberg, Constance and Frankfurt am Main, among others. In 2022 she received the Kunstverein Hannover Award, and in 2023 the research grant for visual arts from the Berlin Senate Administration. 

Catharina Szonn 

Note on the subject of the society of decline (Oliver Nachtwey) 

Courtesy of the artist

Catharina Szonn 

Eternal Exercise, 2024

Film still 

Courtesy of the artist

Catharina Szonn 

Eternal Exercise, 2024

Film still 

Courtesy of the artist

Catharina Szonn 

Eternal Exercise, 2024

Film still 

Courtesy of the artist

Catharina Szonn's work at the Kunstverein, which borrows from elements of skittles, presents a more or less dysfunctional machine: it raises and lowers itself, sometimes with great effort, and seems to train itself with each attempt; the cumbersome movement illustrates wear and tear. The machine acts as a performer, making the redundancy of its actions visible in seemingly endless repetitions. The movements are accompanied on LED displays with poetic comments such as this: "Time is running and with it the distance that spreads between a beginning and an end. Please don't go away. Change your mind and stay. More important than the show is that the future is certain. I want you to love me."

LENA MARIE EMRICH

Lena Marie Emrich (born 1991 in Göttingen, lives and works in Brussels, Göttingen and Berlin) deals with the physical and the linguistic, with spatial and human exchange in her artistic practice, which interweaves performance, documentation and sculpture. Lena Marie Emrich's works and collective projects have been exhibited in Paris, Berlin, Bergen, Leipzig, Düsseldorf and Milan, among others. She has been working as a stage designer at the Schaubühne Berlin since 2022. In 2020 she won the Toy Award of the Berlin Masters Foundation, in 2022 she was awarded the Kunstverein Hannover Award. In 2023 she received the Neustart Plus grant from the Stiftung Kunstfonds. Her works are represented in collections such as the Burger Collection, the Sprengel Museum Hannover, the Arndt Collection and the Marval Collection. 

Lena Marie Enrich 

Process documentation photos 

Courtesy of the artist

Lena Marie Enrich 

Process documentation photos 

Courtesy of the artist

Lena Marie Enrich 

Process documentation photos 

Courtesy of the artist

Lena Marie Enrich 

Process documentation photos 

Courtesy of the artist

The curved shape of Lena Marie Emrich's Gossip Chairs, an installative ensemble on Sophienstraße that invites people to take a seat, means that although the people sitting on them are facing in different directions, they are nevertheless facing each other and are aware of each other. The result is a staged or forced closeness that becomes a game between intimacy and conversation on the one hand and confrontation with strangers, observing and being observed on the other. Whether tête-à-tête or ménage-à-trois - each of the sculptures tells a different story and encourages viewers to engage in shared conversations. Moral questions are addressed based on the shape of the serpentine. 16 texts selected by the artist and accessible via a digital archive are available via QR codes.

Lena Marie Emrich's practice is a symbiosis of sculptural and fragmentary poetry. The wall works "I Heard Only Good Things" and "Rumors Do Not Fall From The Heavens" allude to the ambivalence that gossip brings with it. Although it has negative connotations, gossip accompanies us in our everyday lives: at work or on our nightly rambles, on social media and in other media. The cliché that labels gossip as typically female has misogynistic connotations - and at the same time, it was long the only form in which women could express themselves uncensored on critical topics.

OLE BLANK

In his multimedia practice, Ole Blank (born 1990 in Lübeck) uses social, cultural and natural commonplaces as conceptual starting points, which he translates into poetic and allegorical images in space. Since graduating from the Braunschweig University of Art in 2017, his work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions in Romania, the Netherlands and Germany. Locally, he has been involved in projects such as the Absent Academy and the Niki Residency Program in Hanover. In 2022 he received the Kunstverein Hannover Award. As a fellow of the residency program Fusion:Air 2024 (Romania) and guest artist at the Hertz-Labor (ZKM Karlsruhe), he deepens his practice in the context of transdisciplinary interferences between art, science and technology.

Ole Blank 

Sketch, 2024

Courtesy of the artist

In a sound archive created especially for the new work at the Kunstverein, the artist collected acoustic recordings of beaches, bays and dunes on the various seas of Europe.

The composition begins with the cries of seagulls in the early morning and ends with a cicada concert in the late evening - with the sound of the sea always present. Voices or other references to possible locations are deliberately omitted. The new sound work Wave Room is an attempt to create a surreal phonogram that compresses the European continent in space and time in such a way that it can be explored or at least imagined in its entirety. The result is a contemplative soundscape that can only be experienced through listening.

Previous award winners

2022  Ole Blank, Tuğba Şimşek, Catharina Szonn

2020  Lena Marie Emrich, Sven-Julien Kanclerski, Pablo Schlumberger

2018  Till Wittwer, Lukas Zerbst, Luise Marchand

2016  Isabel Nuño de Buen, Claudia Piepenbrock, Julian Öffler

2014  Laura Bielau, Susann Dietrich, Christian Retschlag

2012  Arno Auer, Ingo Mittelstaedt, Toulu Hassani

2010  Samuel Henne, Fabian Reimann, Anahita Razmi

2008  Özlem Sulak, Sebastian Neubauer

2006  Claudia Kapp, Jacqueline Doyen

2004  Stefan Jeep, Ho-Yeol Ryu

2002  Thomas Ganzenmüller, Antje Schiffers

1999  Hannes Kater, Bjørn Melhus

1997  Hlynur Hallsson, Petra Kaltenmorgen

1995  Christoph Girardet, Anette Ziss

1993  Bernhard Büttner, Aernout Mik, Michael Stephan

1991  Jörg Lange, Brigitte Raabe, Sabine Wewer

1989  Andrea Ostermeyer, Gabriele Regiert, Brigitte Vickers

1987  Friedhelm Falke, Karl Möllers, Siegfried Pietrusky

1985  Petra Rosenthal, Rolf Sextro, Volker Thies

1983  Rüdiger Barharn, Ralph Kull, Klaus Goulbier

The Kunstverein Hannover Award Call for Entries

The call for entries for the next award is online.

Information on the website of the Kunstverein Hannover:

https://www.kunstverein-hannover.de/en/programme/1418-preis-des-kunstvereinshannover

Applications must be received online by the Kunstverein Hannover by September 22, 2024.

Overview of the three scholarships

Lower Saxony Scholarship (January 2025-December 2026)

The two-year Lower Saxony scholarship is awarded to freelance artists who have completed a university degree and are aged up to 35 (at the time of application) and who live or were born in Lower Saxony or Bremen.

Lower Saxony Scholarship for Young Artists (January-December 2025)

The one-year Lower Saxony Scholarship for Young Artists is awarded to freelance artists up to three years after graduation who live or were born in Lower Saxony or Bremen.

National Scholarship for Young Artists (January-December 2026)

The one-year National Scholarship for Young Artists is awarded to freelance artists up to a maximum of three years after graduation who are resident in Germany.

KUNSTVEREIN HANNOVER

Sophienstrasse 2 — 30159 Hannover

www.kunstverein-hannover.de