Gregor Schneider’s exhibition Camere Moarte / Dead Rooms will open on February 13, 2020, from 19.00h, at MARe / The Museum of Recent Art, Boulevard Primăverii no. 15, Bucharest. Curator: Erwin Kessler.

The exhibition will be preceded by the conference Camerele moarte vorbesc tare / Dead Rooms Speak Loud, on February 11, from 18.00h, housed by the Goethe-Institut Bucharest, on Calea Dorobanți no. 32. The public dialogue between Gregor Schneider and Erwin Kessler will be moderated by Joachim Umlauf, director of Goethe-Institut Bucharest.

The exhibition and the conference were made possible through the partnerships between MARe / The Museum of Recent Art and Goethe-Institut Bucharest.

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Opened in October 2018,  MARe / The Museum of Recent Art Bucharest has held until now solo exhibitions of Jeff Wall, Martin Creed, Thomas Ruff and Marcia Hafif, all of them presented for the first time in Romania.

Gregor Schneider (b. 1969, Rheydt, Germany) is a rebellious star artist. His works can be seen either as sculptures, environments, installations, or conceptual contrivances. Or better beyond all of these, as they trigger anxious experiences uncommon in current art.

His first solo exhibition took place when he was only 16 years old. Winner of the Golden Lion award, for his work in the German Pavilion in Venice, in 2001, he is the author of the book Mein Erster Brockhaus (2012), subject of five documentaries, and Professor in most of the prominent German Art Schools, from Berlin to Munich and Hamburg. He is now Professor at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
As any major artist, Schneider has shocked, annoyed and excited the public, he has produced disputes and he has dislocated, at a conceptual and public level, the perception of limits of what we used to call "art". He changed the way art today is made, shown, and experienced.

Gregor Schneider will show at MARe a mirroring, double dead-room installation, a large sculpture (Weisser Negativ Kern Massiv, 1999, from the MARe Collection), 6 videos, produced from 1996 to 2018, and 11 photographs (42x52 cm), taken from 1988 to 1996. The exhibition is both synthetic and revealing, but also demonstrative. It shows the way the artist created new art concepts based on the idea of interior space, living or abandoned space, space as (and with) memory. At the intersection of architecture, design, installation and performance, Gregor Schneider's art is primarily a challenge and a frontal attack on anguish, fear, and death.

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The Gregor Schneider conference Camerele moarte vorbesc tare / Dead Rooms Speak Loud, at Goethe-Institut Bucharest, is an insight into the intricate work and thinking of one of the most provoking contemporary artists. It is a unique opportunity to see and listen to him, and asking him questions. Gregor Schneider bought the house where the head of Nazi propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, was born, only to document and demolish it from inside (leaving only the outer walls intact), then exhibiting the resulting rubble in museums and symbolic spaces in Poland and Germany. Gregor Schneider is a philosopher of vulnerable dwelling, stressing the memory of a house, a town, a country, and of the world.

”Gregor Schneider's dead rooms look like bodies of perfect affective crimes, left open by a critical pathologist. Repressed emotions burst out of them like pale blood in the viscera of the mind. By inhibiting the idea of inhabited space, they exhibit the exposure - the pain of being in a clinical human space, a rhetorical device, and a poetic exoskeleton of guilt, concealment, and amnesia. In Gregor Schneider's dead rooms there is no place for pleasure, comfort or hope, but there is much room for doubt.” (Erwin Kessler, curator, 2020).

The exhibited works:

A ”dead room”, conceived for the dedicated space in the museum,

The sculpture ”Weisser Negativ Kern Massiv”, 1999 // 185.5 x 110 x 74cm. MARe Collection

6 videos:

HAUS u r, Rheydt 1996

TOTES HAUS u r, Venezia 2001

DIE FAMILIE SCHNEIDER, London 2004

WEIßE FOLTER, Düsseldorf 2007

STERBENDE DÖRFER, Garzweiler 2008

UNKNOWN WORK 2019, Island Ogijima 2019)

11 photos:

u r 1 u 14, SCHLAFZIMMER II, Haus u r, Rheydt 1988 (42x52 cm)

u r 8, TOTAL ISOLIERTER TOTER RAUM (5), Giesenkirchen 1988 - 89 (42x52 cm)

u r 8, TOTAL ISOLIERTER TOTER RAUM (12) Giesenkirchen 1988 – 89 (42x52 cm)

u r 8, TOTAL ISOLIERTER TOTER RAUM (14) Giesenkirchen 1988 – 89 (42x52 cm)

u r 10 – 8 Haus u r Rheydt 1993 (42x52 cm)

u r 19, LIEBESLAUBE (1) Haus u r Rheydt 1995 – 96 (42x52 cm)

u r 19, LIEBESLAUBE (2) Haus u r Rheydt 1995 – 96 (42x52 cm)

u r 19, LIEBESLAUBE (3) Haus u r Rheydt 1995 – 96 (42x52 cm)

u r 12, TOTAL ISOLIERTES GÄSTEZIMMER (1) Haus u r Rheydt 1995

u r 12, TOTAL ISOLIERTES GÄSTEZIMMER (2) Haus u r Rheydt 1995

u r 12, TOTAL ISOLIERTES GÄSTEZIMMER (3) Haus u r Rheydt 1995

The exhibition can be visited until May 4.