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Die Kunst ist super ! (Art is super!) is the title under which the National Gallery at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin is showing a new presentation of works from its collections. The exhibition uses thematic, monographic and motivic constellations, surprising dialogues and individual appearances rich in associations to cast works from the National Gallery, the Marx and Marzona Collections as well as the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection in Hamburger Bahnhof in a new light. At selected points the museum's collections are complemented by works loaned by artists, some specially created for the rooms at the museum, as well as by loans from the rich collections of Berlin's museum landscape.

Since the early 1960s Fluxus and Happenings, presented on the ground floor of the main building, developed to become international movements seeking to extend and dissolve the boundaries of art as a concept. The artists involved, including Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostell, explored the use of new materials such as objects of everyday life or food products and media such as television or video. Fluxus, a name derived from the Latin word meaning »to flow«, was directed against traditional concepts of art and their approach towards the material. The artists involved in Happenings, on the other hand, sought to provoke new ideas and change audience behaviour with their complex theatrical actions.

On the occasion of the show Die Kunst ist super! the important complex of work by Joseph Beuys is being newly presented in the rooms of the west wing. Unique throughout the world, this collection of works and film documents impressively demonstrates Beuys' efforts to expand the concept of what constitutes art. His provocative sculptures made from unusual materials such as fat and felt and the film recordings of his performances and political actions offer an insight into the totality of Beuys' thinking. For example, the sculpture Das Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (The End of the Twentieth Century), exhibited here for the first time in its original version, clearly shows the »directional forces« within his utopian thinking which regarded each human being as an artist.

In parallel to the important series of works by Joseph Beuys, the Kleihueshalle is also bringing together major works from the extensive Marx Collection on the theme Vanitas. Vanitas refers to pictorial themes and symbols (like skulls, clocks or mirrors) that recall the transitory nature of all earthly things and caution of the meaninglessness of all striving for riches, sensual pleasure or fame. Questions are raised about the vanity and the glamorous yet simultaneously productive aura of the idol, one of Andy Warhol's central themes. His painting Cagney, which shows the famous screen gangster in a shooting scene, introduces the show and stands as a modern look at Vanitas. The metaphorical aspect of the presentation is strengthened through the dialogues between works of artists as varied as Warhol, Kiefer or Rauschenberg with plaster casts of famous works from the Gipsformerei, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Replica Workshop of the State Museums of Berlin).

The main hall is devoted to two large-scale installations centering on the themes of model and reconstruction, illusion and artistic reproduction. Roman Ondák's installation It Will All Turnout Right in the End appears at first glance to be no more than a large box, deposited behind the columns of the side aisle. Yet the simplicity of its external appearance is counteracted as soon as one enters the installation and finds oneself inside a replica of the famous Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London. For the installation Waggon the Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski reconstructed a historical goods wagon of the type used in the days of the Second World War as a 1:1 model using simple materials. In this work the artist quite consciously uses a sensory illusion to draw the viewer into an interplay between reality and illusion and between history and the present. These works are accompanied by a work which has shaped the history of twentieth-century art: Bicycle Wheel (Roue de bicyclette) by Marcel Duchamp.

On the upper floor of the main building works by Gerd Rohling, Alfred Keller, Lyonel Feininger, Hans-Peter Feldmann and Jochen Alexander Freydank are assembled under the title Modellversuche 1 + 2 (Model Experiments 1+2). Rohling stages a Kollektion (Collection) of coloured vessels in the manner of valuable antique archaeological finds by exhibiting the objects in cabinets and emphasizing their presence with lighting spots. They are juxtaposed with the naturalistic Insektenmodelle (Insect Models) magnified one hundred times, produced by Alfred Keller during the 1930s, from the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. In Schattenspiel (Shadow Play) Feldmann has developed a lively world theatre which captivates the viewer. Feininger's toy town Die Stadt am Ende der Welt (City at the End of the World) allows one to glimpse the artist's quite romantic sense of longing and belonging to those German towns which provided the basis and the motifs for many of his paintings. In addition, Jochen Alexander Freydank's recent Oscar winning short film Spielzeugland (Toytown) is being given its first showing in a museum context.

The contrast between the stingent forms of Minimal Art and the proliferating structure of Gartenskulptur (Garden Sculpture) by Dieter Roth, between the mirror-clad monumental cubes by Isa Genzken and Otto Zitko's lines dancing across the walls are characteristic of the presentation in the Rieckhallen showing mainly works from the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof. Impressive images showing human homelessness such as those by Bruce Nauman or Absalon are juxtaposed with the cosily furnished Heim (Home) by Franz West or Zimmer (Room) by Pipilotti Rist with its giant red seats and TV-set in one of the film rooms on the lower floor.

In an age that has seen supposedly stable systems of values collapse into crisis, their underlying instability laid bare, this new exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof presents art as a dependable variable. In all its flexibility and complexity, its creation of fictions and disillusionment of the same, whichever way you look at it: Art is super!

The outcome of the 1966 Football World Cup is not only legendary but the spectacle itself went down in history and has mythical dimensions even today. Based on original film and audio material, the video and sound installation ‘The Saints' illuminates and reenacts the most important sporting event in postwar European history.

Paul Pfeiffer has transposed the 1966 final to a distant new setting. Some 1000 Filipinos were hired to provide the soundtrack to the reenactment of the 1966 game by cheering, chanting and shouting taunts in a cinema in Manila in the Philippines. The event is thus not only reconstructed and now set in a modern context, but is also transferred in a physical and cultural sense from Wembley Stadium in London to Manila.

The original black-and-white footage and new material with Filipino actors are projected simultaneously alongside one another. Placed at the front is a very small monitor, showing Geoffrey Hurst (the goal keeper of the controversial Wembley goal) as he walks alone with the ball over the empty pitch, whereby a digital process has been used to remove all the other footballers from the picture. The large remaining empty space of the exhibition, some 650 square metres in total, reverberates to the sound of the crowds. The clamour they make fluctuates from riotous enthusiasm, nervous tension and collective joy and results in the sound of Wembley's past being relayed through the various loudspeakers arranged across the room in Pfeiffer's work; albeit now in the form of a soundtrack to a phantom spectacle.


Further information:
Asia Pacific Weeks 2009 - http://www.berlin.de/apforum/apw/
 

KEREN CYTTER, OMER FAST, ANNETTE KELM, DANH VO

The Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst (Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art), funded by the Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie, will be awarded for the fifth time this year. With prize money amounting to 50,000 euros, the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art is one of the most generous awards for contemporary art in Germany. The prize is awarded to artists under the age of 40 who live and work in Germany, irrespective of their nationality.

Four artists have been nominated for the 2009 prize who all live in Berlin: Keren Cytter, Omer Fast, Annette Kelm and Danh Vo. Their works will be presented to the public from September 2009 in a joint show in the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin. After the exhibition has opened a jury will decide on a winner. The prize comes with a sale: one work by the winner of the award is purchased for the National Gallery.

Presented by:
Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin
Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie
 

More:  http://www.preis2009.de

Ford's large-scale animal watercolour paintings evoke prints by French and British colonial-era illustrators from the 19th century. After closer examination however, they reveal a pictorial universe of complex and disturbing allusions. The various tigers, lions, birds and primates that populate the life-size pictures appear as vivacious protagonists locked in allegorical struggles. The resulting combination of historical fact, natural history inquiry and surreal imaginings give rise to a brilliant ‘Bestiarium'.

Walton Ford was born in 1960 in Larchmont in the state of New York and now lives in the mountains of The Berkshires in Massachusetts. Even from an early age, the various exhibits in the Museum of Natural History in New York held a fascination over him. In particular, Ford embarked on an intimate study of the works of the US American ornithologist and drawer of animals, John James Audubon (1785-1851). Walton Ford's search for finding analogies between the past and the present day has led to a series of pictures, created from the 1990s onwards, in which he superimposes intricate natural history depictions with current perceptions and critical commentaries, as well as adding quotes from literary sources from past centuries, rendered in the style of the old masters. In his works, which can be seen as satires on political oppression and the exploitation of the environment, he casts doubt on the adage of the ‘ever new' and the ‘ever better' that has held sway ever since the Renaissance. At the same time he raises questions on a diverse range of set expectations and established rules in contemporary aesthetics. In glorious colour, his pictures open up a view of a reality that we have long since suppressed or forgotten and, with a haunting strength of imagination, a present day ‘Bestiarium' unfurls before our eyes.

The artist conscientiously presents himself as an outsider in the contemporary art world through his body of work, which stands out today as truly singular and has already garnered great attention in the USA. For the first time ever, his pictures are now to go on display in Europe. The exhibition in the Hamburger Bahnhof has been made possible by the Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie.

Following on from the show in Berlin, the pictures will go on display in the Albertina in Vienna.