Exhibition
The exhibition took place from 5 May to 4 August 2010.
REAL ESTATES.
Memory of places / traces of the vanished
The VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna, presented works by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joachim Köster, Gordon Matta-Clark and James Welling in the Vertical Gallery from 5 May to 4 August 2010.
The title of the exhibition Real Estates refers to Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates and is dedicated to the memory of places and non-places, traces of the disappeared and torn down. The works by Bernd and Hilla Becher, James Welling and Joachim Koester follow a documentary search for clues while the works by Gordon Matta-Clark circle “an ‘anarchitecture’, around something that represents an alternative to what is normally understood as architecture.” (G. Matta-Clark)
Curator:
Curated by Gabriele Schor, founding director of the VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna
Team of the VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna
Ema Rajković – curatorial assistant
Barbara Wünsch – curatorial assistant
Artists
REAL ESTATES
Bernd und Hilla Becher | Joachim Koester | Gordon Matta-Clark | James Welling
VERTIKALE GALERIE der SAMMLUNG VERBUND
Am Hof 6a | 1010 Wien
Memory of places / traces of the vanished
Alongside ‘classics’ by Bernd and Hilla Becher, the industrial production sites such as hoist towers (1966-1975) and gasometers (1965-2001), the exhibition also presents 13 sheets from the years 1959-1962, which the two artists compiled themselves with photographs cut out of contact sheets and in which their early ways of thinking and working can be identified particularly well.
In the photo cycle Histories (2003-2005), Joachim Koester compares works from the 1960s and 1970s, amongst others by Ed Ruscha, Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson with his own current shots, which he photographed at exactly the same locations decades later. The cycle The Kant Walks (2003-2004) follows the routes that the German philosopher Immanuel Kant walked daily through Königsberg and shows the present-day situation locally in Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg).
In his photo series, James Welling shows the studio of the Californian artist Jack Goldstein, who died in 2003, as it was in 1977. Jack Goldstein belonged to the Picture Generation together with Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Richard Prince, and became a legend through his disappearance from the art scene.
Gordon Matta-Clark reconstructed spaces anew like no other artist. He redesigned existing places, he sawed and cut them up and in doing so forced new identities upon them. Not a single one of his projects exists today; photographs and films bear witness to his days-long performances. Of the numerous works of Gordon Matta-Clark in the possession of the VERBUND COLLECTION, the works that can be seen include Splitting: Exterior (1974), Artpark (1974), Day's End, Pier 52 (1975), Conical Intersect (1975), Untitled, Cut Drawing (1975), Doors, Trough and Through (1976), Office Baroque (1977) and Circus No. 14 (1978).
