Gregor Schneider

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 until now 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 Totes Haus u r, have been the highlights of contemporary art exhibitions around the world.
In 1998, before Schneider was invited to participate in the Biennale in Venice, the Hamburger Kunsthalle had already begun to plan an exhibition project with the artist, a plan which has been further developed and is now being implemented. In this abbreviated retrospective, a number of different rooms that were created besides 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. The rooms he creates elude identification or become absorbed by their own ordinariness. 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 exhibition extends over a total of 14 rooms in the museum. Five large rooms by the artist, along with series of photographs, sculptures and a double video projection, will be shown in the Galerie der Gegenwart. In the rotunda of the old building Schneider has created a completely new, ‘in-built’ structure which incorporates the urban exterior surroundings into the interior of the Kunsthalle and is accessible from the outside of the building 24 hours a day, independent of the museum opening hours. The exhibition is supported by die tageszeitung. A catalogue was being published to accompany the exhibition, priced € 19.50.