Exhibitions

ART TREASURES

Lower Austria is a cultural landscape with a long-standing art tradition. The first portrayals of Venus came about in the old Stone Age. Today, the nation owns an important art collection of international standing. With the title ART TREASURES. FROM THE BAROQUE TO THE PRESENT this selection of treasures from the Lower Austrian national collections will be shown for the first time in Germany.

The show focuses on high carat works of paintings, sculptures and photographs as well as selected video works. The oldest work in the show is a baroque altarpiece from 1772 by Martin Johann Schmidt, the youngest a conceptual contemporary painting by Franziska Maderthaner of the year 2021. The exhibition spans over 250 years and gives an overview of the main directions of development in Austrian art history.

An exhibition of the Kunsthalle Tübingen in cooperation with the national gallery of Lower Austria and the national collection of Lower Austria.

 

Curators: Dr. Nicole Fritz, Dr. Gerda Ridler, Dr. Nikolaus Kratzer

 

Künstler*innen der Ausstellung 

Ferdinand Andri, Maria Biljan-Bilger, Herbert Boeckl, Herbert Brandl, Ferdinand Brunner, Gunter Damisch,  Die Damen, Padhi Frieberger, Helene Funke, Gelitin, Anton Hanak, Marcel Houf, Isolde Maria Joham, Hildegard Joos, Johanna Kandl, Oskar Kokoschka, Brigitte Kowanz, Elke Silvia Krystufek, Heinz Leinfellner, Broncia Koller-Pinell, Johann Peter Krafft, Maria Lassnig, Friedrich Loos, Franziska Maderthaner, Joseph Marsteurer, Michael Neder, Hermann Josef Painitz, Sergius Pauser, Helga Philipp,  Margot Pilz, Leo Putz, Arnulf Rainer, Thomas Reinhold, Anton Romako, Robert Russ, Hubert Scheibl, Roman Scheidl, Egon Schiele, Martin Johann Schmidt, Josef Schwaiger, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Erwin Wurm, Michael Wutky

 

The exhibition is supported by

 

Minister-president Winfried Kretschmann is taking on the patronage for this exhibition

INNER WORLDS

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, revolutionized the concept of man at the beginning of the last century. His exploration of the “unconscious” became the driving force behind the European avant-garde of his time, and he shaped the culture of the 20th century like no other. For example, his idea that the way human beings feel, think and act was greatly influenced by the unconscious helped to generate the pan-European art movement Surrealism early in the last century.

Among Expressionists, his psychology unleashed a search for the self. In the immediate post-war period, and inspired by Freud, artists of Informalism and Abstract Expressionism both in Europe and America tried to render the creative forces of the unconscious in the material form of painting. The exhibition will be developed in cooperation with the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna and will trace the reception of Freud’s theories in art from the 20th century to today: from creative processes striving to ‘materialize’ inner worlds at the start of the last century, to the existentialist approaches of the post-war period, to Concept Art in the 1980s and feminist stances in post-modernism, all of which reflect, sometimes critically, the heritage of the master of psychoanalysis in the language of art.

An exhibition of the Kunsthalle Tübingen in cooperation with the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna

Curators: Dr. Nicole Fritz and Monika Pessler

with the kind support of the Helmut Klewan Collection

 

Artists of the exhibition:

Herbert Bayer, Hans Bellmer, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Victor Brauner, Barbara Breitenfellner, Günter Brus, Heidi Bucher, Gregory Crewdson, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Delvaux, Maya Deren, Max Ernst, Richard Gerstl, Alberto Giacometti, Walter Gramatté, Julie Hayward, Birgit Jürgenssen, William Kentridge, Käthe Kollwitz, Oskar Kokoschka, Juro Kubicek, Rachel Lachowicz, Robert Longo, René Magritte, André Masson, René Magritte, Hermann Nitsch, Richard Oelze, Hans Op de Beeck, Meret Oppenheim, Man Ray, Arnulf Rainer, Markus Schinwald, Nadja Schöllhammer, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Sammlung Helmut Klewan, Cindy Sherman, Haim Steinberg, Hermann Struck, Raoul Ubac, Umbo, Raphaela Vogel, Kay Walkowiak, Jeff Wall, Franz West, Francesca Woodman, Thomas Zipp, Heimo Zobernig

 

The exhibition is sponsored by

DANIEL RICHTER

His work deals with reality, which he translates into the language of painting.

Daniel Richter (1962) is regarded as one of the most important painters of his generation. He lives in Berlin and Vienna. Over the past three decades, and with an untiring creative energy and a great delight in experimentation, he has created a comprehensive oeuvre amounting to more than 1,000 works. Daniel Richter’s vibrant and multifaceted stream of paintings draws both from existing pictorial worlds and from inner visions – it is subjective and at the same time collective. By emotionally charging clichés from popular culture, the media, and stylistic elements from art history, Richter carries on the expressionistic gesture of immediacy in a conceptual way and once again questions the possibilities of painting, above and beyond stylistic definitions.

 

Daniel Richter’s artistic beginnings were originally in the field of the applied arts. In the 1980s he designed record covers and posters for bands. From 1991 to 1995 he studied painting at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg. By engaging with the figuratively neo-expressionistic painting of artists like Werner Büttner, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, Richter went on to develop his own colourful way of painting, which was inspired by abstract-ornamental graffiti. From the outset, this exuded the punk attitude of Hamburg’s subculture.

Around the year 2000, Daniel Richter discovered figuration for himself. This enabled him to translate his experiences with, and his idea of the world into the non-verbal idiom of painting, albeit narratively. Inspired by newspaper photography and history books, he did large-scale history paintings similar to stage sets. Like allegories, these threw light on peripheral figures in society, on social dramas and on crucial historical events. In works like Dogs Planet (2002), Captain Jack (2006) or Fatifa (2005) he processed the violent social reality of demonstrations, war and flight in disturbingly surreal-psychedelic scenarios and nightmarish landscapes reminiscent of science fiction. Alongside his large social panoramas he also did small, more intimate paintings, symbolist self-portraits and still lifes that reflect the conditio humana today.

Since 2015 Richter’s repertoire of motifs and also his painting style have become increasingly more abstract. Motifs such as porno images from the media, or postcards of First World War invalids, seem to provide merely the initial impetus for an aesthetic engagement with formal means, such as colour, line and plane. The latter now seem to be to the fore. Yet the fruits of his latest work phase are anything but l’art pour l’art, although they still reflect the Zeitgeist of a crisis ridden and tense present, given that they are more abstract and less narrative. Not least they have a signal effect and captivate our senses, inviting us to think things through.

The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Tübingen, which is presented more in the form of a retrospective, is the first in many years to again provide a survey of Daniel Richter’s works in Germany – in all its facets. The exhibition has been organised in close collaboration with the artist and has been developed especially for the rooms at the Kunsthalle Tübingen. The main focus is on the figurative impulse in Daniel Richter’s work and on the question of how, again and again over the past three decades, the artist, through his figurative repertoire, has both thematically and stylistically re-addressed the relationship between man, body and society, as well as between internal and external reality.

 

Curator: Dr. Nicole Fritz

SISTERS & BROTHERS

The majority of us grew up in a family, and although we usually leave the family as young adults, we mostly continue to stay in contact with our original family. What we experience in our ‘family’, whether as an only child or with siblings, exerts an influence on our whole life. Surprisingly, the longest and often most intense relationship in the life of each one of us – that with our siblings – has scarcely been investigated so far in the sciences and has surely never been the theme of an art exhibition.

With the exhibition “Sisters & Brothers. 500 Years of Siblings in Art” the Kunsthalle Tübingen aims to make the first comprehensive documentation of the emotional theme of sibling relationships in the fine arts, and to do so on the basis of about 100 works. From the perspective of cultural history and by way of a chronological tour, the paintings, sculptures, objects and videos on show visualise how the depiction of siblings changes from the 16th century to the present. This leads from the beautiful appearance in genre painting via the romantic and bourgeois image of siblings to contemporary depictions. What also emerges is that contemporary artists not only critically and ironically fracture the historical depictions of siblings in their works, but also undertake “deep drillings” of their own that throw light on the challenging sides of relationships with siblings. The artworks on show are complemented by objects from the field of cultural history, thus expanding the theme in the direction of everyday culture.

Accompanying the exhibition is a comprehensive interdisciplinary catalog with contributions by Tilman Allert, Nicole Fritz, Tilo Grabach, Zita Hartel, Bernd M. Meyer, Sabine Wienker-Piepho. The publication provides an important prelude to a long overdue, well-founded analysis of siblings in our society.

The exhibition will subsequently be taken over by the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Austria.

 

Concept and curation: Dr. Nicole Fritz

Curatorial assistance: Zita Hartel and Lisa Maria Maier

An exhibition of the Kunsthalle Tübingen in cooperation with Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz

 

Artists of the exhibition
Nevin Aladağ, Joseph Beuys, Miriam Cahn, Eugène Carrière, Gustave Courbet, Otto Dix, VALIE EXPORT, Asana Fujikawa, Julie Hayward, Erich Heckel, Christine and Irene Hohenbüchler, Christian Jankowski, Alexej von Jawlensky, Hanns Ludwig Katz, Heinrich Kühn, August Macke, Nicholas Nixon, Idowu Oluwaseun, Helga Paris, Joanna Piotrowska, Emy Roeder, Anton Romako, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Thomas Schütte, Moritz von Schwind, Cindy Sherman, David Sulzer, Gert & Uwe Tobias, Erwin Wurm, Georg Friedrich Zundel, et al. a.

 

Sponsored by:

 

In cooperation with:

Christian Jankowski

Christian Jankowski is one of the most influential action and concept artists of his generation. To this very day, he has been repeatedly surprising the international art world, particularly with his subversive performances and actions. Jankowski was born in Göttingen in 1968. He developed his distinctive artistic approach, which involves a systematic socially-relevant praxis, in response to the context art of the 1990s, among other things.

Having studied in Hamburg in the early 1990s, his work was marked both by Franz Erhard Walther’s participatory activation of artworks and by the “image refuser” Stanley Brouwn, who, like Franz Erhard Walther, expanded the concept of art to include the viewers. Jankowski has also been influenced by Martin Kippenberger and Werner Büttner, who undertook to deconstruct socio-political topics in both images and words, and in a subversively ironic way.

Even as a student, Jankowski caused a furore with actions such as Die Jagd (The Hunt 1992), during which he slayed foodstuff in a supermarket using an archaic bow and arrow. His hunting activities between the supermarket shelves made the 23-year-old famous overnight, as it were. He frequently appeared as the protagonist in his early performances and videos, the aim being to provoke rational consciousness and to enchant, in the truest sense of the term, audiences again with works such as Mein Leben als Taube (My Life as a Dove, 1996).

Around the turn of the century, Jankowski expanded his art to include social systems such as that of religion, politics and the entertainment industry. Here he himself increasingly remained in the background, as the image designer. Instead he availed himself of existing media formats and their production processes so as to clearly illustrate routine behaviour in the respective profession. He embroiled TV priests, politicians or fortune-tellers in collaborations so that they voluntarily became team mates, sometimes even unwittingly. This appropriation strategy culminated in 2011 in Casting Jesus (2011), for which he got representatives of the Vatican to choose the best Jesus using the format of the Casting Show.

The large-scale monographic show at the Kunsthalle Tübingen entitled I WAS TOLD TO GO WITH THE FLOW presents a survey of Jankowski’s extensive oeuvre, encompassing not only films but also photographs, sculptures and paintings. Here the metaphor of the travelling artist leads to the heart of Christian Jankowski’s artistic praxis. Not only is travel a constant components of his life, it has also become encoded in his DNA as an artist. Adopting the distant stance of a researcher, Jankowski also engages with his own culture. The exhibition invites viewers to see our life world, history, the media and art from a whole new perspective.

To accompany the survey show at the Kunsthalle Tübingen an extensive catalogue will be published with essays by Karen van den Berg and Oobah Butler and with illustrations of all the artist’s works from between 2014 to 2022.

 

Curated by:

Dr. Nicole Fritz

 

Curatorial assistance:

Lisa Maria Maier

 

Accompanying the survey show at Kunsthalle Tübingen is the comprehensive catalog TRAVELING ARTIST, with contributions by Karen van den Berg and Oobah Butler, which includes all of the artist’s works from 2014 to 2022.

Karin Sander

Over the past four decades Karin Sander has developed an artistic position of her very own in the tradition of Post-minimalism. She smashed the rigid attitude of the Concept Art of the 1960s, expanding it by means of sensually processual-participatory approaches.

She responds to everyday, architectural, institutional or social givens with a seismographic intuition  and uses subtle interventions to change them. For example, she burnishes images into the wall by turning the quadrature of the conventional placing on the wall into a mirror of the surroundings. Or else she breaches the symbolism of the depiction of an object in a museum, like in the series of “kitchen pieces”, for example, in which instead of the vanitas of a still life, the fruit actually present decays before our eyes.

Her works not only exhale the strictness of Minimalism in formal terms, they also unfold an unexpected poetry. Linking into the premise of Minimal Art, a major role is ascribed to the viewer’s perception. By making us not only think her works through to the end, but also respond to these with all our senses, Karin Sander’s works ultimately realise the utopia of Minimal Art so as to objectivise our perception and lead it to a schematic clarity and logic.

Exhibitions of work by Karin Sander have been shown in, among others, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco, in the Whitney Museum in New York and in the Museum of Contemporary Art Osaka; her works have also gained her numerous awards.

 

Curated by Nicole Fritz

 

 

BROCHURE FOR THE EXHIBITION

Annett Zinsmeister

ANNETT ZINSMEISTER (born 1967 in Stuttgart) has lived in Berlin since 1990. She gained an international reputation with her site-specific works and spectacular spatial interventions. Works of hers are on show in galleries, museums and at biennials worldwide: in 2015 MoMA New York commissioned a spatial installation especially for its collection. Under the format AUSSER HAUS she will design a new façade work for the high-rise building opposite the Kunsthalle at the request of the Kunsthalle Tübingen.

Annett Zinsmeister works with existing spatial elements and urban structures, transforming them into unusual space situations that examine and question not only our visual habits and our perception, but also the limits of spaces. Her installations and space- and image-constructions thus become experiential spaces and fictive constructions that confront us with transitions and intermediary spaces and motivate us to think: about the relationship between man and his environment, body and space, the space between reality and fiction, the analogue and the digital, between visibility and invisibility.

 

Curated by Nicole Fritz

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ fascinates audiences worldwide with her performances, films and, most recently, her opera project 7 Deaths of Maria Callas. What is not so well know however, is the fact that this pioneer of performance art was also a guest in Tübingen from her early years in the 1970s up till the year 2000, in the Ingrid Dacić gallery. The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Tübingen is devoted for the first time to the spiritual aspects of Marina Abramović’s work.

Linking into the tradition of European mysticism, in the past five decades this pioneer of performance art has developed an undogmatic, individual access to the transcendental that expands the religious traditions to include shamanist, alchemical and Buddhist elements. By means of selected major works the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Tübingen, curated by Nicole Fritz in close collaboration with Marina Abramović and her studio, focuses on these spiritual aspects of the artist’s work, pursuing her rite of passage – her journey to her inner self.

At the end of this development stands the, in the truest sense of the term, self-conscious artist, devoted initiator and charismatic performance teacher Marina Abramović, who passes on her experience in workshops and the institute she founded, called the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI). Her aim is to use collective exercises to bring her audience into contact with themselves again through art.

A comprehensive catalogue (German/English) will be published to accompany the exhibition, with interdisciplinary contributions by Erich Ackermann, Hartmut Böhme, Jeannette Fischer, Nicole Fritz, Antje von Graevenitz, Volker Leppin and Bernhard Pörksen.

Curated by Nicole Fritz in close collaboration with Marina Abramović and her studio

 

 

supported by

                                     

 

media partner:

Wer malt denn da?

1941 hat Konrad Zuse den ersten Computer gebaut. Damals war dies eine Maschine – keiner dachte an Kunst. Heute schreiben Computer Musikstücke und humanoide Roboterwesen wie Aida fertigen Porträts von Menschen an und malen Landschaftsbilder. Die künstliche Intelligenz hat längst auch Einzug in die Ateliers gehalten und wird die Kunst und ihre Produktion massiv verändern. Zu welchen faszinierenden Ergebnissen es führen kann, wenn künstliche Intelligenz in die Welt der Kunst einzieht, zeigen die neuesten computergenerierten Werke der Tübinger KI-Medienkünstlergruppe Lunar Ring.

Deren aus unterschiedlichen Sparten stammende -Mitglieder Mirko Franjic, Niklas Fricke, Alexander Loktyushin und Johannes Stelzer erforschen die künstlerischen Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten der KI-Technologie.

Für die Ausstellung Herzstücke hat Lunar Ring auf Grundlage von Meisterwerken aus der Kunsthalle Emden neue visuelle Phänomene generiert: Mittels eines KI-Verfahrens, das auf Neural Style Transfer aufbaut, werden die in der Ausstellung chronologisch präsentierten Werke der Sammlung zu neuen Visuals verknüpft. Gleich einem Bewusstseinsstrom spiegelt uns die Medienarbeit 1902-2012 damit den roten Faden der expressiven Kunst von den Expressionisten, über die Cobra- und Spur-Künstler bis zu den jungen Wilden der 1990er Jahre wieder. Die auf diese Art und Weise im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes mittels Technik „verflüssigte“ Malerei von Max Pechstein, Asger Jorn oder Salomé erhält nicht nur eine atmende Präsenz, sondern scheint auch ein Eigenleben zu entwickeln, das nicht zuletzt die Magie selbstlernender Systeme auf faszinierende Art und Weise anschaulich macht.

Darüber hinaus werden unter dem Titel Wer malt denn da? Kinderbilder, die in Workshops der Kunsthalle Tübingen entstanden sind und während der Ausstellung entstehen, zu neuen Visuals verknüpft.  Vor unseren Augen verschmelzen die Kinderbilder in Echtzeit zu immer neuen abstrakten Form- und Farbkompositionen. Es entsteht ein digitaler Bilderstrom, der ins Unendliche fortgesetzt werden kann und nicht nur Kinder in seinen Bann zieht.

 

Kuratiert von Dr. Nicole Fritz

 

Das Projekt wird unterstützt von

                        

 

SUPERNATURAL

Following the exhibition ALMOST LIVE, which presented hyper-realistic sculptures extending up as far as the turn of the millennium by the pioneer- generation, the exhibition SUPERNATURAL asks about the future of corporeality in the Anthropocene.

Given the technological developments in biogenetics, man will be in a position in the future to existentially alter everything living, nature, the animal world and the images of man. What will bodies look like in the future? Who or what will we be? In what kind of environment will we live?  The exhibition SUPERNATURAL presents responses from the realm of hyper-realistic and realistic sculpture.

The forward-looking works not only reflect impacts of the digital revolution and genetic technology on “post-human” man and the environment, they also illustrate by means of hybrid creations that in our day the borderlines between nature and culture have become fluid. Increasingly, technical innovations also play a role in the development of the latest hyper-realistic sculptures.

When the artists perfect their production processes using 3D printing and extend the sculptural limits in the direction of robotics and synthetic biology, for them too, new design possibilities open up that are located somewhere between artefact, biology and technology.

 

Concept: Nicole Fritz

 

Curators: Nicole Fritz and Maximilian Letze

 

Sponsored by