HAMBURG, GERMANY.- The Hamburger Kunsthalle presents “Gregor Schneider · Hannelore Reuen,” on view through May 11, 2003. Born in 1969, Gregor Schneider has become known as an outstanding artist with an unusual and enigmatic oeuvre, not least since he was awarded the Golden Lion for his work Totes Haus u r (Dead House u r), installed in the German Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale.
Haus u r in Rheydt, the long-term project Schneider has been working on in a radical and obsessive manner since 1985, has been made accessible only to relatively few visitors in its labyrinthine and claustrophobic reality. Individual rooms have been extracted and room situations (re-)created, which, like the Totes Haus u r, have been the highlights of contemporary art shows around the world.
In 1999, before Schneider was invited to participate in the Biennale in Venice, the Hamburger Kunsthalle had already begun to plan with the artist the exhibition project that is now being implemented. In this abbreviated retrospective, a number of different rooms that were created besides the Haus u r will be shown.
The replication and multiplication of rooms in both a visible and invisible manner is a key element of Schneider’s artistic method. Recycling the structural elements in his installations requires such an enormous investment of time that Schneider has described his work as the ”downright elimination of economy”.
In Hamburg the artist will focus on his own work history. The exhibition centres around the aspects of ”doppelgänger” and ”vanitas”, also offering a new perspective on the complex relationship between Gregor Schneider and the figure of Hannelore Reuen.
The presentation comprises five large room installations in the lower floor of the Galerie der Gegenwart, accompanied by multipart photographic series and video projections. Besides this, Schneider is creating a completely new, ‘in-built’ inverted structure for the rotunda of the old building, forging a link between the interior of the Kunsthalle and its urban surroundings but accessible only from the outside of the building. The exhibition was curated by Frank Barth.