COLLECTION ROOMS: Ongoing

A paired presentation of work by the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher and Catherine Opie.

 

Collaborating artists Bernd and Hilla Becher (b. Siegen, 1931-2007; b. Potsdam, 1934-2015) are celebrated for their grouped photographs of industrial structures taken across Europe and America, often grouped in 'typologies.' The couple met as students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and began working together in 1959. Influenced by the German art movement Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), their sited photographs of power plants, mills and factories documented industrial structures in danger of decline. Guided by a rigorous formal aptitude, the Bechers arranged their photographs in galleries and in books to invite comparison between structures. Their grid arrangements resulted in a new kind of photography of geographically dispersed but similar subjects across decades. This installation includes key examples from their career, including images of lime kilns in the Netherlands, and winding towers in Great Britain, Germany, France, and the United States.

 

Now based in Los Angeles, Catherine Opie (b. 1961, Ohio) is celebrated for examining American identity and community through the traditional genres of landscape and portraiture. Though Opie works simultaneously between the two, this presentation focuses on the landscapes, drawing examples from foundational series including Freeways, Mini-Malls, American Cities, and Lake Michigan. Her work honors the technical aptitude and conceptual curiosity of the Bechers', but also draws from American photographers like Walker Evans, expanding from rigorous formal principles to underscore social class issues. While Opie's work subverts serial photography, her subjective approach is explored through changes in scale and perspective, as well as the occasional embrace of color and abstraction.

Featuring approximately 200 paintings from Dreher's celebrated series, Tag um Tag guter Tag, the show is supplemented by key works from earlier series, offering a context to the celebrated still lifes which defined Dreher's career. While the artist is well remembered within Germany as a dedicated painter and professor, this is the first solo presentation of his work in Lower Saxony. The show will display his foundational series in various formats, including in grids and lines, offering varied and novel approaches to Dreher's singular contribution to post-war German art.

Widely regarded as the pre-eminent European artist of his generation, Franz West (Austrian, 1947-2012) is known for willfully unserious, non-ideological, and sometimes mischievously erotic mixed-media drawings, sculptures, and furniture. Replete with contradictions, West's work is often joyful, even silly, yet can be tinged with fragile vulnerability and an undercurrent of existential nihilism. It concerns itself-often simultaneously-with lofty philosophical pursuits and the basest of human conditions: laziness, boredom, drunkenness, or sexual desire. His intentionally crude collages combine awkward, isolated figures from magazine ads with slapdash coats of thick paint.

The group exhibition Cuts Into Space includes over two dozen historic paintings and sculptures by Carl Andre, Alan Charlton, Michael Heizer, Ulrich Rückriem, Fred Sandback, and Richard Serra. The newly installed exhibition extension in the attic of the Verwalterhaus is only on view by special guided tour and includes work by artists that expand beyond the early phases of European and American Minimalism, like Keith Sonnier.

Employing a unique and specific set of strategies, each artist explores and expands on Minimalist principles such as geometric order, repetition, and space and void. Reduced to their most essential elements, their works exist in relation to the space they inhabit. The title of the show comes from a statement by Carl Andre: "I DO NOT CUT INTO MY ELEMENTS, MY ELEMENTS ARE CUTS INTO SPACE".