Georg Baselitz – HIRSCH I & HIRSCH II

TEENAGE WASTELAND
the catalogue for the exhibition
by ANSELM REYLE is ready!

Watching Anselm Reyle at work is a special moment. He works with concentration, but is also very relaxed and manages an action like spraying the work »Allover« with great fortitude. In the end, it looks very good. The colors are right, they’re not really pleasing, and Pollock is all over the room.

Gregor Schneider and »The dark side of the world«

Today, July 15, 2023, Gregor Schneider receives the Ernst Franz Vogelmann Prize for Sculpture 2023 at the Rathaus Heilbronn, endowed with 30,000.00 euros and accompanied by a large retrospective exhibition at Kunsthalle Vogelmann. At the press briefing on July 14, Marc Gundel, Director of the Heilbronn Museums, emphasized that Gregor Schneider was now the sixth award winner. Three of the predecessors, whose life’s work has already been honored with the Ernst Franz Vogelmann Prize, had previously also been awarded the Golden Lion in Venice for their contributions.
Claudia Ihlefeld writes in the »Heilbronner Stimme« (July 15, 2023) about the exhibition of Gregor Schneider in the Heilbronner Kunsthalle Vogelmann: »To dive into Schneider’s cosmos is a special experience. ... While Schneider transferred 24 rooms to Venice in 2001 and re-built them, there are fewer in Heilbronn. But his artistic strategy of transforming everyday spaces into irritating places with a few precise interventions is the same. ... ›Corona has made us aware again that we cannot escape spaces,‹ Gregor Schneider explains his work in conversation. But also that ›art is not always humane in a positive sense. There is a dark side of the world,‹ Schneider says succinctly. And that in a double sense: whoever enters his spatial sequences in the Kunsthalle steps into the dark. ... Since his youth, Gregor Schneider has been building spaces that take their origin in the so-called ›Haus u r‹ at Unterheydener Straße 12 in Mönchengladbach-Rheydt. Since then, doubling and repetition have been his modus operandi – in the sense of confirming what already exists or what potentially exists. Nothing is really invented, but reconstructed. Thus the work ›Odenkirchener Straße 202‹ – which can also be sensed on the ground floor of the video installation – questions the historical responsibility and the handling of National Socialism: using the example of Joseph Goebbels’ birthplace. Just in the Biennale year 2001« – at that time he was awarded the Golden Lion for his work »Haus u r« in the German pavilion – »Schneider learned that it stands only a few hundred meters away from his family home, Haus ur, and acquired the property. Not ›to rewrite history,‹ but rather an opportunity for the space specialist to research the ›state of the unspoken, the incomprehensible.‹«