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181010: Kunstmuseum Bonn The west lights up. A sighting of the art landscape of the Rhineland
Kunstmuseum Bonn
The west lights up. A sighting of the art landscape of the Rhineland
10.07.10 - 24.10.10
Fixed stars and planets
Since Beuys’ days, the Düsseldorf Art Academy has been a stronghold for contemporary names. Whereby nothing has changed since Tony Cragg took over the management from Markus Lüpertz. Admittedly, no more art-storms à la Beuys brewed up here for a long time. All the same, photo artist Andreas Gursky, the art market megastar and photo pupil of the legendary Düsseldorf Becher class, belongs to the list of new teaching acquisitions. Meanwhile – and who would ever have thought it – Gursky presently heads a painting class.
This, however, can be quizzically explainable in an exhibition at the Bonn Art Museum entitled "The West Lights Up", which doesn't only show Gursky's giant photographic boards from the current "Ocean" series. Gursky blows up and treats satellite pictures, virtually compresses the earth mass to the left and the Pacific to the right so that these form the frame at the edges by means of many, many computerized churning and pulsating dark blue seas. The observer can orient himself in an associative way between Mark Rothkos' meteorological precision and color field meditation – splendid! What resonates here – see the actuality of the day – doesn't have to be emphasized.
Just a few rooms further on, Gursky's "god-child" is billeted. We refer to the sculptor, Bernd Kastner, almost as old as the godfather himself, born in 1957. Brusque terracotta figurations full of new glazes can be seen, almost as if they had been covered and congealed by lava. The relational work balance is not exactly close in this case and difficult to comprehend from the point of view of the visitor.
But this is not the center point of a gigantic Bonn exhibition concept which can be seen until the 24th of October and which reminds one of the best days of the museum mile with federal art hall neighbors. The point of it is, basically, to act against the rumor (or none?) that in the Rhineland, the artistic lights are gradually going out: Art Cologne and Cologne's culture politics are in a continual state of flux, there is little of the visionary in the exhibition programs of the great houses, an exodus of art trade and young artists in the direction of Berlin. That's why a sort of temporary new set-up in the form of 33 artists in 33 rooms is intended for Bonn's art museum, furnished with, perhaps, the most representative spectrum of German art since 1945. The “West Lights Up”-system offers a core of established Rhineland giants, among them Beuys, Cragg, Knoebel, Palermo, Polke and Richter. People like Bernhard Johannes Blume, Isa Genzken, Georg Herold, Albert Oehlen, Marcel Odenbach, Thomas Schütte or Rosemarie Trockel belong to the 14 "god-fathers".
The majority of those born in the 1970's are among the "god-children" of this capricious art gathering which is being tried in the Rhineland region, and which wants to discover new things and consciously stimulate the familiar in order to reinvigorate the Rhineland "We" feeling. So Cragg’s pupil, Gereon Krebber, isn't really a particular surprise. Nearly as exciting is the black stylized photographic art of Jürgen Klaukes who surprises with his “god-child” Christian Keinstar. His massively heavy conglomerate of demolition steel concrete is "heated" by means of red glowing metal threads.
Director Stephan Berg, sponsored by the Land NRW and its Art Foundation, by the Rhineland Territorial Association and the Bonn Savings Bank Art Foundation, definitely doesn't want to practice a "Rhineland-bashing" (O-tone Berg); he rather has a "Grand Tour" in mind because not only the Düsseldorf Quadriennale is going into its second version in the expanded, newly opened art collection Nordrhein-Westfalen (K 20) since September (with Paik and Beuys projects). One doesn't want to sound small in the current culture capital project, Ruhr2010, whereby it's not so long ago that the respective contemporary art projects were there.
Bonn's questionable precarious West enlightenment at least enlivens the topics of conversation about art and the curation of art (this, indeed, by curating artists).
By Roland Groß
Art Museum Bonn
53113 Bonn, Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 2
Tel: +49 (228) 776260
email: kunstmuseum@bonn.de
http://kunstmuseum.bonn.de/start.htm
Opening hours: Tue-Sun 11 a.m. – 6 p.m., Wed 11 a.m. – 9 p.m.
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
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181010
Kunstmuseum Bonn
53113 Bonn, Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 2
Tel: +49 228 77 6260
Email: kunstmuseum@bonn.de
http://www.kunstmuseum-bonn.de/
Öffnungszeiten: Di-So 11-18, Mi 11-21 h
Kunstmuseum Bonn
53113 Bonn, Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 2
Tel: +49 228 77 6260
Email: kunstmuseum@bonn.de
http://www.kunstmuseum-bonn.de/
Öffnungszeiten: Di-So 11-18, Mi 11-21 h
