GREGOR SCHNEIDER

EXHIBITION PROGRAM 2000

"Keller"
Gallery
March 30 – May 21, 2000
 
 

Gregor Schneider, Secession, 2000
 
 
"I have the justified hope that, if we take things very seriously and act accordingly, we can change the world," Gregor Schneider once noted in an interview. The earnestness of his art is objectified by the Haus ur in Mönchengladbach-Rheydt, which he has for years been constantly modifying and which he shares with his ever-invisible neighbor, Hannelore Reuen. Now Gregor Schneider is to install the basement rooms of the house in the Secession's Gallery.
 
Schneider's interventions in the substance of the modest house in Rheydt are, on the surface, hardly noticeable. Visitors may enter a succession of rooms without perceiving anything more than the more or less spartan interior and diffuse light behind curtains blowing in a light breeze. The window is, indeed, slightly open, but it's an almost silent ventilator blowing behind it; instead of the sun, neon tubes give off light, and the view is not to the outside but to the windowless wall of an inaccessible room. Schneider creates a trompe l'oeil in three dimensions. Its spatial boundaries are set in a way to prevent the original shape of the room from being recognizable.
 
In the layerings of walls, floors, ceilings, and windows history has become sedimentary and is only reconstructable at the price of its own destruction, without its ever actually having disappeared. Schneider, in so doing, is not producing a pretentiously self-referential secret - whoever knows nothing of the layers behind will scarcely perceive more than a peculiarly jumbled cellar space. Instead of settling into a self-satisfied role as an omniscient creator, the artist has systematically lost himself in the maze of rooms. He succeeds in the construction of unknown spaces that are open to the sudden appearance of the uncanny as well as to that of the utopian.
 
Schneider's interest is thus piqued by experiences with the boundaries at which visibility and recognition no longer self-evidently go hand in hand. The facelessness of the anonymous spaces - cellars like the one on exhibit can be found in many old Viennese structures - make them interchangeable. But at that point their utopian potential also starts to unravel. Schneider's installation sharpens the senses that find in the everyday the scattered traces of long-ago events.
   

PUBLICATION

GREGOR SCHNEIDER 8 pages, 13 b/w photos author: Noemi Smolik Secession 2000 ___________________ available in the shop

 
 
Gregor Schneider was born in Rheydt, Germany, in 1969; he lives and works there today. (Selected) exhibitions: Galerie Massimo de Carlo (1999, Milan); Konrad Fischer Galerie (1999, 1993, Düsseldorf); 53rd Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art (1999, Pittsburgh); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998); Galerie Wako (1998, Tokio); Galerie Luis Campaña (1997, 1995, Cologne); Portikus, Kunsthalle Frankfurt a.M. (1997)
 
 

MERLIN CARPENTER

EXHIBITION PROGRAM 2000

 
 
 
For further information and photographic material please contact:
 
Urte Schmitt-Ulms
Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Tel: +43-1-5875307-21, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34
presse@secession.at