Skip to main content

Gregor Schneider

November 10 – December 20, 2003
515 West 24th Street
 
Download Press Release

Barbara Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present new work by the German artist Gregor Schneider. 

Schneider is most known for his captivatingly obsessive Totes (Dead) Haus u r, which he began working on in 1985 at the age of sixteen.  Compulsively reconstructed, altered, distorted, built and rebuilt, the Haus has been transported all over the world, most notably occupying the German Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001, for which Schneider won the Golden Lion prize.  Once an ordinary home in Rheydt, Germany, the ever-changing Haus has now been transformed in innumerable ways.  Rooms have been built within rooms, walls have been raised in front of walls, exits have been obscured, doors and windows have been blocked and hidden while others have been created or revealed in their place.  Adding to the confusion, even the air that moves and the sunlight that seems to trickle in from the outside are merely illusions as their sources lie in ventilators and hidden lights.  Today, Schneider himself is hard-pressed to locate the original elements of the structure.

Along with his Totes Haus u r, Schneider’s body of work is also comprised of sculptures, photographs, drawings, and video.  In his first solo exhibition in New York, Schneider will draw on these sources to create sculptural and architectural tensions within the space of the gallery, exposing unexpected, often uncanny, foundations and meanings.  Through Schneider’s often-elaborate process of creation, banal spaces become mysteriously capable of an illusory disorientation.  Therein, Schneider’s sculptural environment envelops the viewer in an utterly enigmatic space with its overwhelming materiality and subtle visible and invisible shifts.  As Schneider himself states, “. . .  even the work becomes forgettable.  As soon as you have built a stone into a wall . . . after a while you don’t know where it is anymore, and the same thing happens again and again.  It’s like that with a wall and exactly the same with a room.  As soon as someone spends any time in a room, you accept it as a normal room.”   

The Haus will be on view concurrently at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.  A fully illustrated monograph, designed by the artist with an essay by Paul Schimmel, will accompany the exhibitions.  This will be the first monograph on Schneider published in English.  Gregor Schneider was born in 1969 in Rheydt, Germany where he continues to live and work.  In addition to the exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Schneider’s other solo exhibitions include the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2003); Museum für Gegenwartkunst, Siegen; the 49th Biennale di Venezia (German Pavilion), Aarhus Kunst Museum, Denmark; Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Kunsthalle Frankfurt am Main; and the Kunsthalle Bern.  Selected group exhibitions include the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Site Santa Fe; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Carnegie International.