19.12.2024 \\ 22.02.2025
The exhibition
Bauen und Töten gives an insight into the most significant steps in Gregor Schneider’s career. Spanning from early performative and photographic endeavors to more recent artworks, the exhibition ultimately circles back to the artist’s legendary Gesamtkunstwerk, the Haus u r in Rheydt, Germany — an ongoing work started in 1985 – in order to explore the boundaries drawn by the possibilities and impossibilities of artistic representation, as well as the tension between collective and personal memory – all motifs remarkably crucial to Schneider’s practice.
The exhibition is a call back to 2001, the year Schneider won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale with Haus u r. The Gesamtkunstwerk radically upset the inner and outer structures of the German pavilion: the artist removed the country’s letters from the building’s façade, replaced the German flag with that of the city and repurposed the space by installing a matryoshka of rooms dismantled and taken from his family house in Rheydt.
By decentering the 2001 installation, the exhibition aims to unveil the passageways and conceptual interconnections that mark Schneider’s practice before and after this date, shedding light on the most significant elements of his research and aspiring to deliver the profound complexity of the artist’s world. The works on display span from early performative and photographic endeavours from the 1980s, through the Goebbels’ house (Odenkirchener Straße 202, Rheydt 2014), the Kolkata series (It’s All Rheydt, Kolkata 2011), sculptures belonging to the Repeated Objects series and the Insulated Boxes series (such as Child (Sitting without Head) No. 1, Rheydt 2004), to videos from the extirpated villages in the Rhenish coal district near Rheydt (Sunny Demise, Tagebau Hambach, 2022).
Displayed on the first and second level of Palazzo Caracciolo di Avellino, headquarters of Fondazione Morra Greco, the exhibition is designed to blend in with its surroundings – the 18th-century painted walls of the first floor and the stucco and painting ornaments on the second – that add yet another degree of questioning and complexity to the never-ending and visionary wish of Gregor Schneider, which is to unpack all the material and symbolic implications of the places we inhabit and make our memories in.
Texts curated by Giulia Pollicita
Bauen und Töten relies on the IFA (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen / Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations) support.
The project is co-financed with funds from Piano Strategico Cultura e Turismo 2024/2025 – Progetto Global Forum Mostre d’arte contemporanea EDI 2024.
Public Program
Fondazione Morra Greco is proud to present the public program dedicated to the new exhibition, Bauen und Töten: a diverse platform of meetings and activities that varies in languages and audiences, aimed at investigating the potential of the connections tying art, emotional memory and historical memory.
The program – continuously updated – includes guided tours, workshops, book presentations featuring critics, artists, educators as well as teachers and students in order to produce and experience the cross-disciplinary and multidisciplinary approach presented by the exhibition.
Guided tours
PFor all Saturdays in January, Fondazione Morra Greco’s team is offering guided tours through Bauen und Töten to discover the artworks and themes behind the exhibition.
The tours – meant for all audiences and lasting about 50 minutes – are free and available via reservation through the dedicated Eventbrite page or via email, by writing to info@fondazionemorragreco.com
Below the schedule of next tours:
Saturday 18 January 2025 | 17:00
Saturday 25 January 2025 | 17:00
Workshop | The memory of forgotten objects
For children and families
The workshop takes as a starting point The Goebbels’ House series, centered around the house where Joseph Goebbels, the minister of nazi propaganda, once lived. Gregor Schneider spent several days inhabiting the rooms of Goebbels’ house, performing actions such as eating and sleeping, eventually turning it into a stage where he could perform daily chores to come into closer contact with objects, furniture and gestures – all filled with their own stories, presences and evocative imagery. His stay ultimately led to the almost complete destruction of the house.
Beginning with suggestions evoked by the artworks on display, participants will have the chance to weave their own connections between objects and personal memories through perceptive games, creative and textual compositions and other various forms of expression in order to voice and express their own personal stories and inspirations.
Below the schedule of next events:
Saturday 18 January | 12:00
Saturday 25 January | 12:00
Please book your reservation on the dedicated Eventbrite page.
Workshop | Matrioska of Rooms
For adults and young adults
The itinerary takes its cue from Totes Haus u r (“the dead house”), the installation that won the artist the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Art Biennale. The faithful reproduction of the artist’s studio in the hometown of Rheydt was transported in its entirety within the walls of the German pavilion, transformed for the occasion into a container – a cramped set of rooms and antechambers with bricked-up doors and windows – with no possible openings to the outside world.
But who, precisely, was it housing? What did its walls see and feel? What did its objects tell? Many questions arise when picturing this white, dusty, labyrinthine house where time seems to have been suspended.
The workshop’s path, using the concept of home as a space that is synonymous with both safety and discomfort, offers audiences the possibility to create one’s own “house of memories”, taking images and objects from the past in order to awaken reflections on both the present and the future.
Below the schedule of next events:
Friday 17 January | 16:00
Friday 24 January | 16:00
Please book your reservation on the dedicated Eventbrite page.
Presentation of the book “Di-scordare. Ricerche artistiche sull’eredità del fascismo in Italia” by Viviana Gravano
23 January 2025 | 17:00
As part of the renewed collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, on Thursday, January 23, 2025 Fondazione Morra Greco will host the presentation of the new book by Viviana Gravano – a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts engaged in militant research – entitled Di-scordare. Artistic Research on the Legacy of Fascism in Italy published by DeriveApprodi.
Presented in conversation with Giulia Grechi, professor of Cultural Anthropology and Anthropology of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, the volume focuses on how de-fascistization has been an imperfect process, mainly ineffective on a cultural level. Fascism and Mussolini himself were able to use culture as an extraordinary tool of consensus and some of the legacies left behind by the dictatorship are sadly still present in the spaces we inhabit daily.
Di-scordare addresses the process of removal and revisionism implicit in artistic disciplines, suggesting a careful analysis and research of the works of artists that since the 1980s have taken it upon themselves to reread those traces and decode those meanings in order to conduct an open, political, conceptual critique of them.
Participation is free upon registration at the Eventbrite link below:
https://bit.ly/presentazione-volume-di-scordare-viviana-gravano
For the students of the Academy of Fine Arts it should be noted that this event is part of the calendar of activities – soon to be announced – curated by Professor Grechi and valid for the recognition of training credits (ECTs). The participation to three presentations – please refer to the calendar – will qualify for the recognition of one ECT. Signatures of attendees will be collected at the event.
Gregor Schneider and Fondazione Morra Greco
By revisiting the œuvre of the artist that opened the institution’s activities twenty years ago with the exhibition 26.11.2006, Fondazione Morra Greco also wants to celebrate its long-standing commitment to the promotion of contemporary arts and culture.
After several years of cultural programming, residencies and educational research, the Foundation still preserves an unconditioned belief in the heuristic force of artists to unhinge and rebuild paths to the future.
Similarly to Schneider’s process of programmatic building and un-building, the exhibition acts as a vehicle for the Foundation to speculate and rethink its path – both accomplishments and undertakings included – up until the present.
Artist bio
Gregor Schneider, born in Rheydt in 1969, still lives in Rheydt. The central medium of his practice is the installation of spaces within similar, pre-existing spaces, the duplication of spaces, people, and objects, or the reconstruction of buildings that cannot be physically accessed. His most well-known work is the so-called Haus u r in Mönchengladbach-Rheydt, Germany – an ongoing work started in 1985.
Over the course of forty years, Gregor Schneider has created a body of work that touches upon some of society’s sorest spots. At the very beginning of his career he started developing the concept of an artistic practice that devours its own products, thereby questioning the subjection of art to economic necessity. Later, he found parallels between the secret, antiseptic, high-security cells for detainees of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp and the ‘white cube’ of museums and galleries. In 2008, he spoke about creating a room to die in and his desire to show a dying person in a museum. Schneider has also staged cultural crossovers, attempted to make links between a Catholic and Islamic sacred site and has responded to the return of the spirit of the Nazi era with the pulverization of the house Joseph Goebbels was born in.
The exhibition Bauen und Töten takes the viewer on a largely chronological journey, with stops at significant milestones in Schneider’s work.
The accompanying publication, Bauen und Töten (“Building and Killing”), illustrates key works that reveal the trajectory of Gregor Schneider’s career to date, supplemented by extensive commentary from the artist and the curator.
Beginning with his first museum exhibition in 1994 at the Haus Lange Museum in Krefeld, Schneider has since exhibited in prestigious institutions, including Kunsthalle Bern, Portikus Frankfurt, Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn, among others. Films from Haus u r (1985-ongoing) have been exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.
In 2001 he won the Golden Lion at the 49th Venice Biennale. In Italy he has had solo exhibitions at Museo Macro, 2008; Fondazione Volume, 2010; Art City Bologna, 2021. His artworks are also part of relevant private collections, such as Collezione Morra Greco in Naples and Giacomo Mazzari’s collection in Milan.
Upon opening in 2006, Fondazione Morra Greco dedicated to Gregor Schneider its first exhibition, 26.11.2006.
Further information available at the artist’s website: www.gregor-schneider.de