Abstract

Exhibition of the Akademie der Künste at Hanseatenweg 10 and Pariser Platz 4
Opening: Thursday, February 22nd, 6 p.m. at Pariser Platz, 8 p.m. at Hanseatenweg

The exhibition opens up a particular perspective on the art of the 20th century through a critique of
the concept of modernity. Instead of stylistic, developmental or medial aspects, the transformation
and the diversity of concepts of space in art composes the criterion of the selection. The mobility of
modern societies has resulted in the weakening and ultimate dissolution of traditional orientations,
the reverse of which is an enormous differentiation and enrichment of artistic conceptions of
spatiality.

At Hanseatenweg, the divergence of pictorial concepts will be made visible using examples of
several classical positions of the modern period from the 20th century. The painted studio walls,
including a group of related sculptures from Alberto Giacometti, provide the focus for a
presentation that attempts to define the field of tension between the intimacy of creative scope and
its pictorial objectification with works by Picasso, Max Ernst and Matisse, Bonnard, Paul Klee,
Morandi, etc.. This selection will be flanked on one side by early photographs from Albert Londe,
Man Ray, Medardo Rosso and Brancusi, through which the new form of spatial perception become
clear through the filter of photography. On the other side, the works of Gordon Matta-Clark create
a reference to the deconstructive spatial conceptions of contemporary art.

The exhibition venue at Pariser Platz, on the other hand, is reserved for significant examples of the
artistic confrontation with so-called "real" space. Here an installation of the "wall pieces" from
Mondrian‘s last New York studio provide a reminder of the origin of the project, extending beyond
the reality of the image through artistic strategies and intervening in the actual living space of
people.
Works by Bridget Riley, Fred Sandback, Santiago Sierra and others represent the most disparate
developments arising from this approach since the 1960‘s. This presentation is supplemented by
photographs by Thomas Demand and Hiroshi Sugimoto, as well as contributions by Trisha Brown
and Gary Hill, who emphasise the performative dealing with "real" space. At Pariser Platz, too, the
exhibition thus declines to provide conclusive theses, but instead invites visitors to expand their
comprehension of the field of reference of contemporary art.

Hanseatenweg

The photographic space
The emergence of photography, chronophotography and film changed the conception of space.
X-ray photography and microcinematography allow the representation of pictorial spaces beyond
three-dimensionally imagined spatiality. The fragmentary view, close-ups and snapshots, but
particularly enlargement, open up new pictorial worlds, which differ fundamentally from the
traditional spatial constructions of European panel painting. The simultaneous perception in
tableaux of action sequences anticipates a way of seeing that dispenses with a main figure or a
compositional focal point. The sequential works are met halfway by the principle of repetition and
of the series, which appears to have become characteristic for modern art in general. The moving
image breaks open well-trodden patterns of perception and puts the traditional conception of static
space into question – the chronological dimension gains in importance. The Surrealists turn to the
non-Euclidean spaces of mathematics and transform them in their works. Sculptors, who work in
the three-dimensional sphere of activity, make use of photography and film, not in order to
produce two-dimensional simulacra, but rather to create specific pictorial spaces with blurring, the
self-dynamic of light and shadow and other methods of photography. In historical terms this means
that experimentation occurred very early with the montage and the departure from dimensioned
pictorial space. The studio and the staging of this location of art becomes its own theme in
photography.

Works by Constantin Brancusi, Albert Londe, Jean Painlevé, Man Ray, Medardo Rosso, Soichi
Sunami

The assembled space
At the end of the First World War, artists who had radically placed in doubt the foundations of all
up to that time valid societal and artistic conventions, began to topple the spatial and pictorial
concepts of the past in Zurich, Paris and Berlin. With the montage, they developed a technically
motivated form of expression in the merging of very different image and text elements, mostly of
banal origin. Dada was a radical strategy aimed at providing the, in the perception of the artists,
completely fragmented and at the same time enormously accelerated reality an anti-form, which
breaks equally with any kind of mimetic practice and with passed on forms of presentation.
Everything became ›material‹ for the montage. Dada not only figuratively departed from artistic
space, it also left and held in contempt the museums and art societies. Newspapers, brochures,
leaflets and cafes were the new locations of this art. The montage principle encompassed all artistic
areas, in particular revolutionising the still young film genre. The political photo montage of the
twenties and thirties, of whose aggression only a faint glimmer reflects in today‘s advertising
graphics, was a logical consequence of Dadaism. On the other side, the protagonists of Dada and
the emerging Surrealism reconquered the galleries by disenchanting the concept of art with ready-
mades and material collages, redefining it in the name of ›objectivity‹.

Works by John Heartfield, Marcel Duchamp

The pictorial space
A common starting point of the various directions and developments in the art of the 20th century
is the experience that there is no true or correct picture of reality. Each image is a place of
perception defined by boundaries, which has no real archetype in immediate perception.
Photography and plein air painting of the early modern period had shown that there were only
more or less successful pictorial equivalents for our beguiling familiarity with the visible world. This
discovery led to a nearly explosive development of the design possibilities in painting and
sculpture. The adjective known as ›plastic‹ (Fr. plastique) became a key concept in the art
discourse of the twenties, which allowed the image to become the location for a comprehensive
making visible of realities. No matter appeared to be too extreme that the fitting pictorial space
could not be found for it: Whether as an expression of feeling or rational construct, embodiment or
dematerialisation, fantastic game or intimate obsession, utopian scheme or descent into the
unconscious, the extremely different and often controversially implemented intentions resulted in
unexpected riches in terms of spatial inventions within the limits of the image. However, at the
same time, the need to grow beyond this limitation toward the entelechies of pictorial space and to
explore the apparently unlimited "real" space beyond the studio grew.

Works by Pierre Bonnard, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Kasimir
Malewitsch, Henri Matisse, Giorgio Morandi, Pablo Picasso

The empty space
The contact with non-European pictorial cultures, especially that of the Far East, had already
considerably changed the conception of space as a tectonic housing of objects prevailing in French
painting of the 19th century. Much of this, for instance the medium of the space-opening corner
composition, found its way into the repertoire of the art of the 20th century.
But it was first the involvement with Far Eastern thought that awoke the interest of western artists
in the twenties and thirties in a spatial concept that conceived of emptiness not as a vacuum, but
instead as a bearing foundation. Following the Second World War, this tendency entered into a
nearly inextricable relationship with the existentialist solution of accepting existence as a draft of
nothingness. An excess of history and ideological confusion paved the way for an art that
prescribed to the paradox of not merely occupying the space of the representation, but rather of
simultaneously creating space through the thrifty, and consciously "meagre" use of the media of
creation, as eminent location of experience. Leaving out became a strategy of condensation in the
visual arts and in music. At the same time, Alberto Giacometti showed what intensity of
representation is possible when the human figure is interpreted as a recess in space.

Works by Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett, Alberto Giacometti, Bruce Nauman

The social space
In the sixties, intervention in urban space and the confrontation with social space becomes a
significant aspect of contemporary art practice. Exemplary of this change in the comprehension of
space are the boundary crossings between visual arts, architecture,
performance and film. Through spectacular interactions in existing buildings, space is not primarily
perceived as a formal or phenomenological problem, but instead as a product of social power
relationships, which are vulnerable and malleable, and can thus be subjected to critique. The
integration of physical and haptic elements into artistic activities entangles the social visions with
the sensual experience of spatiality, thus reconnecting the experience of the place-lessness and
globalisation of social spaces with physicality.
While this concept of the production of space leads to artistic action outside of exhibition space, the
problem of the appropriate presentation of temporary interventions is posed in an exhibition
context. This is joined by positions concerned with the transformation of pictorial space that
attempt to banish societal structures into ornamental patterns. In addition to the integration of
technical visual media, such as photography and video, the drawing and the large image format
are given a new function. The visual relationship of script, characters and drawing are thereby of
importance. The video installation, which often integrates the acoustic element, temporarily
transforms the white cube of the modern exhibition space into the black box for video projection.

Works by Francis Alÿs, Gordon Matta-Clark, Rashid Masharawi, Mark Lombardi, Michal Pĕchouček

Pariser Platz

Bodies in space
The boundaries between dance, performance, action and body art have long been flowing. The
genre to which a performative work belongs is defined to a greater extent by the framework of
reception than by the movement itself. It is simultaneously space-exploring and space-creating.
With the rediscovery of the body as a location of art at the end of the sixties and the subsequent
discourses concerning the mechanics, manipulation and metrics of the body, the experience of
constriction in its spatial, mental, organic and social manifestations has come into view. The
experience of being captured in the body and the visions of overcoming this, a counter-
reformatory-Baroque basic motif, became the subject of artistic self-exploration. To quasi nullify
physical space or to fail in face of it: both are extreme situations to which artists subject
themselves in order to record them.

Works by Trisha Brown, Gary Hill

The fictive space
The post-modern self-reflection of artistic media took hold of photography at the same time as the
other visual arts. However, its technical form of production and its promise of reality, which long
endures in the consciousness of the viewer, changes standards. The subjective in the objective
experienced its deconstruction in a very different way. In addition to ›staged photography‹,
which serves spatial and location-related, documentary modes of representation, a conceptual
photography arose, which made the procedure of reproduction itself the theme. Time, space and
object are all variables. The (non) reality surfacing in the image can be just as easily constructed
as it can be extended in its chronological progress. It can be dissected through quasi-scientific
approaches or appear as a fictitious document. Digitalisation dissolves the limits of the availability
of pictorial material. The selected images based on analogous methods simultaneously ensure
architectural-spatial motifs and have the incontrovertible relativity of the visible as their theme.
They take up a correspondence with Constant‘s architectures, which, at the end of the modern
period, once more called upon the rational principle of collective creativity and the imaginativeness
of utopia.

Works by Dieter Appelt, Constant, Thomas Demand, Santiago Sierra, Hiroshi Sugimoto

The "real" space
Since the beginnings of the modern period in the 19th century, artists have again and again
attempted to break out of the limitations of easel painting and pedestal sculpture. The progression
of painters extends from Delacroix to Matisse. The history of the sculptors who chose "real" space
as the ideal destination for their art, and not the aesthetically protected space of the work of art,
begins with Rodin‘s The Burghers of Calais. Not usually of primary importance is thereby the
philosophical question of whether the space can even accommodate reality; as "real" space, of
much greater importance is the totality of the existing space for social activity. This pragmatic
orientation intensified at the beginning of the sixties, as a young generation of North American
artists confronted the existentialist pathos of the abstract expressionists with the sheer presence of
the object: "it is what it is". Beyond the stylistic differences between pop and minimal art, an
aesthetic positivism began to gain the upper hand, which accused any kind of imaginary
representation of space, and especially those of painting, of being "illusory". Conversely, this
radicalisation led to increased conceptional interest in the difference between art and reality, and to
the rehabilitation of intimate forms of expression under the aegis of postmodernism.

Works by Tadeusz Kantor, Edward Krasiński, Piet Mondrian, Chris Newman, Bridget Riley, Fred
Sandback, Klaus Staeck