COLLECTION ROOMS: Ongoing

Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg welcomes you to a new installation in the former "sculpture studio" of Georg Baselitz. During his approximately 30-year ownership of Schloss Derneburg, Baselitz transformed a large part of the castle into studio space for painting, sculpture, and printmaking. However, the former castle kitchen of the previous owners - the Münster family - was his primary sculpture studio until the "New Studio" building was completed in 1995. Preparatory wall drawings made by Baselitz while he lived and worked in the castle are preserved and exhibited here alongside documentary photographs taken by the artist's long-time friend and former gallerist, Benjamin Katz. The diamond patterned floor and iron infrastructure which supported the weight of blocks hewn from tree trucks are prominent in Katz's photographs and are still present today.

 

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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.

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".