The Dortmunder U. Photo: Hans-Jürgen Landes, Gestaltung: labor b
|
Agathe Snow, Walls, 2010. Collage for the catalogue 'All Access World'. Photo: Kris McKay. © Agathe Snow
|
Andreas Feininger, View from Midtown Manhatten on Lower Manhatten, from: New York und Chicago in the Fourties, New York, ca. 1941. Deutsche Bank Collection
|
Rob Voerman , Thistlegarden#2, 2011.Deutsche Bank Collection. © and Courtesy Rob Voerman
|
Beat Streuli, Martinique, n.d.. Deutsche Bank Collection. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich
|
Richard Buckminster Fuller, GEODESIC STRUCTURES-MONO HEX, from the series "Inventions:Twelve around one", 1981, Deutsche Bank Collection
|
Shirin Aliabadi, Girls in Car 2, 2005. Deutsche Bank Collection. Courtesy of the artist ant The Third Line, Dubai
|
Friedrich Seidenstücker, Untitled, from „Pfützenspringer-Serie“, Berlin, 1930/2002. Deutsche Bank Collection
|
Yane Calovski, from: Master Plan, 2008. Deutsche Bank Collection. © the artist, courtesy ZAK | BRANICKA, Berlin
|
|
|
The masters of German Expressionism, photographers of the “Dusseldorf School,”
young artists from India, Slovakia, or Iran: each of them shows us
urban spaces from new and unusual perspectives. Particularly for
younger generations of artists, the city is a place to experiment, to
formulate criticism, to archive, intervene, and to think things to
conclusions. This multiplicity of artistic perspectives and strategies
aims to inspire visitors to the exhibition Stadt in Sicht (City in Sight) at the Dortmund Museum am Ostwall to
think about the future of today’s cities. A first step in this
direction is a more conscious perception of urban space, its
architecture, and its people.
The exhibition location
itself already shows how vastly our idea of urban life has changed. The
former Union Brewery in the center of Dortmund, the “Dortmund U,”
has been an art and cultural center since 2010 that houses the Museum
am Ostwall and numerous other institutions. The impressive building has
quickly risen to become one of the city’s newest trademarks, and it
stands for the structural transformation of the Ruhr Valley and the
search for new solutions for living, working, quality of life, and
culture.
The oldest work in the show leads us more or less straight back to the place itself: Josef Albers,
born in Bottrop, became world-famous with his abstract paintings of
squares within squares. In his lithograph series of 1917, however, he
realistically depicts the worker’s settlements that are typical for the
Ruhr Valley. The show’s newest work, on the other hand, is a far more
dystopian vision: Rob Voermans Thistlegarden # 2
(2011) portrays a scene reminiscent of New York. In the midst of a
geometry of skyscrapers, an organic, parasitic anti-architecture
flourishes. Like a gigantic alien being, it has taken root in the
city’s remaining vegetation, proclaiming its downfall and the dawn of a
new era. A century lies between these two works, one hundred years
during which life in the metropolis has become one of art’s major
themes. The exhibition from the Deutsche Bank Collection, however, is
not organized chronologically, but rather leads the viewer thematically
through a century of urban life. The excursion takes us with Otto Dix and George Grosz into the nightclubs and cafés of 1920s Berlin, or, with the Iranian photographer Shirin Aliabadi, into Teheran’s streets, where young women partying in their cars. Whether it’s Imi Knoebel projecting crosses of light onto building facades in the 1970s, the Moroccan Yto Barrada photographing new buildings in Tangiers like sculptures, or the Indian artist Dayanita Singh
letting the mega city Mumbai resemble an organism riddled with nerves
and arteries: the exhibition shows how artists present the city in a
distorted or aesthetic way, or actually intervene with their work.
At the end of the show are the visions and utopias “the exhibition sends its visitors home with,” as Prof. Dr. Kurt Wettengl, the Director of the Museum am Ostwall, explains. Among these are the futuristic designs of Buckminster Fuller, who dreamed of a more socially just world during the Cold War era, and the collages of the young Danish artist Jakob Kolding, who affords us an Alice-in-Wonderland-like peek into another reality behind the modernist satellite city.
“Stadt
in Sicht”, city in sight—this doesn’t merely mean that we should see the city with
other eyes. The title of the exhibition in the Dortmund U suggests that
in terms of the future of the city, we are in the midst of a journey.
Where this journey leads—and the show also demonstrates this—also
depends on whether each of us seizes the chance to help shape the city
of tomorrow.
Stadt in Sicht - Von Feininger bis Gursky
Werke aus der Sammlung der Deutschen Bank
20. April – 04. August 2013
Museum Ostwall im Dortmunder U
|
