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Spot On 02
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This summer saw the first of the Spot On series of exhibitions at museum kunst palast. The second set is to follow soon – beginning on 29th November, 2008. The Spot On principle is to install a group of six project spaces anew every half-year, with our collections as the source of inspiration. New acquisitions will be presented and offered for debate. The latest research findings and achievements in restoration within the collection are to be shown, as are ‘reruns’ of notable exhibition events from the past. In addition, small-scale shows of work by artists living in or with particular links to Düsseldorf will be mounted. It is intended to include video programmes and performances in the range.
One of the spaces celebrates the South African artist, Marlene Dumas (b. 1953) with a concentrated selection of work. This artist has been living and working in Amsterdam since the 1970s. Last year, she received the 2007 City of Düsseldorf Art Award. The new works made for the exhibition have been inspired by the implications of the concurrent museum exhibition entitled Diana and Actaeon. The Forbidden Glimpse of the Naked Body. Dumas’s works will be integrated in this display in a separate gallery.
The project space dedicated to Olof Jernberg – Der natürliche Blick /’Olaf Jernberg, The Natural Eye’ is devoted to a hidden treasure at museum kunst palast. For over fifty years, the estate of Düsseldorf artist Olof Jernberg (1855 – 1935) has been slumbering in the museum stores, waiting to be rediscovered. We will be showing a selection of his best work from the wealth of oil sketches and paintings in the museum’s possession. They unfold as a wide, diverse spectrum from landscapes and genre subjects to portraits, depictions of animals and still-lifes and manifest the influences of significant currents in the art of the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Canadian artist David Rabinowitch (b. 1943) is known for his sculptures and no less for his drawings. Unlike most sculptors, this former teacher at the Düsseldorf Academy does not make drawings necessarily in preparation for the sculptural work, but as formally independent entities. We owe gratitude to a private collection for the permanent loan to museum kunst palast of a characteristic floor sculpture which we will be complementing in the project space with drawings both from the same private collection and from our own.
The project space in the Glasmuseum Hentrich will be given to works by Julius Weiland. This glass artist was awarded the Jutta Cuny-Franz Foundation sponsorship prize in 2007. For the MILCHSTRASSE (Milky Way) exhibition, Weiland will be creating large-scale objects by fusing innumerable sections of industrially manufactured glass tubing. He thus creates objects of an astonishing breadth of variation and which explore chaos and order, build up tensions in their serial arrangement or have the ability to produce differing planes of expression.
For two years now, our visitors have been greeted in the foyer of the Kunstpalast by the Vegetatives Nervensystem of Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger. The Swiss artist couple developed the piece specifically for the Kunstpalast site as a construction some sixteen metres high, of twigs and roots, fine rope and wires and a host of diverse and artificial and genuine plant fragments and small objects – some of these found in the stores of museum kunst palast. On the occasion of Spot On, we intend to take a second look at ‘old friends’ in the Collection and so stimulate new thoughts and associations.
In addition we are also reconstructing what was styled the Borngräber Zimmer (Borngräber Room), a striking example of 1980s New German Design. Following the collage principle, young German designers at this time, among them Christian Borngräber, created furniture out of tools, bulky rubbish and other found items. These pieces of furniture, some of whose creators wittingly sought to distance themselves from the vocabulary of form and materials of the design classics, were founded on an art approach and were presented accordingly. Slogans such as Neue deutsche Gemütlichkeit introduced suites of furniture and interiors that were appreciated rather by a ‘small, radical minority’.
Publications will be issued on the individual Spots and will also be available as an omnibus volume.
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