REAL ESTATES. Memory of places / traces of the vanished

Memory of places / traces of the vanished

Alongside ‘classics’ by Bernd and Hilla Becher, the industrial production sites such as hoist towers (1966-1975) and gasometers (1965-2001), the exhibition also presents 13 sheets from the years 1959-1962, which the two artists compiled themselves with photographs cut out of contact sheets and in which their early ways of thinking and working can be identified particularly well.

In the photo cycle Histories (2003-2005), Joachim Koester compares works from the 1960s and 1970s, amongst others by Ed Ruscha, Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson with his own current shots, which he photographed at exactly the same locations decades later. The cycle The Kant Walks (2003-2004) follows the routes that the German philosopher Immanuel Kant walked daily through Königsberg and shows the present-day situation locally in Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg).

In his photo series, James Welling shows the studio of the Californian artist Jack Goldstein, who died in 2003, as it was in 1977. Jack Goldstein belonged to the Picture Generation together with Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Richard Prince, and became a legend through his disappearance from the art scene.

Gordon Matta-Clark reconstructed spaces anew like no other artist. He redesigned existing places, he sawed and cut them up and in doing so forced new identities upon them. Not a single one of his projects exists today; photographs and films bear witness to his days-long performances. Of the numerous works of Gordon Matta-Clark in the possession of the VERBUND COLLECTION, the works that can be seen include Splitting: Exterior (1974), Artpark (1974), Day's End, Pier 52 (1975), Conical Intersect (1975), Untitled, Cut Drawing (1975), Doors, Trough and Through (1976), Office Baroque (1977) and Circus No. 14 (1978).