Produced on the occasion of Josef Strau’s exhibition at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 3 September–22 November, 2020, the first comprehensive institutional solo exhibition by Strau in Germany.

The exhibition brought together objects and text production made between 1991 and 2020 as an attempt to create an autobiographical depot, as if these objects were simply the result of time or of durations of psychological states, such as fear and anxiety, and sometimes also of desire. Strau’s complex, nested retrospective vessel contains, in addition to everyday stories, a random selection of objects representing, among other things, tigers, temples, tears, fences, children’s letters, angels, icons, and cured turtles. The most recent work is a spider clock, The 13 Hour Cymbal Spiderclock that exhales the Dreams, which announces a new time beyond the usual twelve hours.

This book aims to illustrate a little-known aspect of ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s art, the “artist’s invitation,” namely the material (be it a card or piece of paper) printed for the specific purpose of documenting an exhibition. The criterion employed to choose the material was that of privileging the participation of the artist him- or herself in the creative process that led to the object’s production. The artistic context on which this book focuses is that of Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Land Art, Pop Art, Fluxus, and Actionism, including Spanish and South American art, the importance of which warrants a new critical attention for the historical and political significance these movements had in their respective sites. The materials considered here come almost entirely from the collections of Bruno and Alessandra Tonini, Christoph Schifferli, Giorgio Colombo (Milan), and the Lafuente Archive (Santander).

Produced on the occasion of gerlach en koop, Was machen Sie um zwei? Ich schlafe, at the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, 19 September 2020–28 February, 2021. In an exhibition at the edge of sleep gerlach en koop display works by Ismaïl Bahri, Kasper Bosmans, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Mark Geffriaud, Voebe de Gruyter, Ian Kiaer, Kitty Kraus, Gabriel Kuri, Rita McBride, Guy Mees, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Helen Mirra, Laurent Montaron, Melvin Moti, Jean-Luc Moulène, Henrik Olesen, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud, Emilio Prini, Bojan Šarčević, Shimabuku, Steve Van den Bosch, and a contribution by writer Haytham El-Wardany

Available to download here.

Set of 5 cards produced on the occasion of Jef Geys, Bergen Kunsthall, 20 November 2020–5 April 2021.

The exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall looks into some aspects that are specific to Jef Geys’ oeuvre, such as his work with pedagogy, architecture, and art history. Through a series of different chapters, the exhibition brings seminal works together with rarely seen objects and archive materials, focusing on the artist’s use of different production and circulation systems, such as the school, industrial workshops, rural spaces and the art world. His use of these distinct systems is explored as a questioning of authorship and identity, but also as an investigation of infrastructures through which meaning and knowledge is produced and distributed.

More information on the exhibition can be found here.

Nicholas Tammens’ talk Jef Geys and the School can be found here.

Mondo Cane presents itself as a local folkloric museum that displays the human figure. Silent, pale and frightened, the pavilion’s inhabitants appear as aestheticized shells, stuck in a loop of formal activity that the visitor perceives as odd and out of touch with contemporary reality.

Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys have the habit of distilling fictions out of a reality that is, sometimes, ‘too real.’ Both willingly concede that they feel attracted to the psychotic state of contemporary societies, a state that they simultaneously dread and disseminate in their work.

Designed by Boy Vereecken and Antoine Begon.

Produced on the occasion of the survey exhibition, Charlotte Posenenske: Work in Progress at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 30 May–2 August, 2020.

In the 1960s, parallel with American Minimalism and the emerging Conceptual Art, Charlotte Posenenske (1930–1985) developed an impressive body of minimalist works within just twelve years, thus demonstrating her innovative understanding of art. Although the artist, who worked in Frankfurt am Main, exhibited during her lifetime together with artists such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, and Sol LeWitt, and, in 1967, had an exhibition in the gallery of Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf, which had opened only shortly before, her contribution to the discourse of Minimalism and Conceptual Art remained largely ignored for a long time.