The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum Features Contemporary Art From Germany

Written by John Sheridan Friday, 16 September 2011 02:10

St. Louis, MS.- The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is pleased to present "Precarious Worlds: Contemporary Art From Germany", on view at the museum through January 9th 2012. This exhibition will feature the first five works acquired thanks to an extraordinary gift from the David Woods Kemper Memorial Foundation to support the acquisition of new works by artists living and working in Germany. “Over the last two decades, Germany has reemerged as an intellectual and creative center of the international art world,” says Sabine Eckmann, the William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator of the Kemper Art Museum. “These new acquisitions will strongly enhance the museum’s outstanding collection of contemporary German art. They also provide a fresh opportunity to explore how artists have responded, both explicitly and implicitly, to the acceleration of globalization and its broad effects on culture, commerce and society.”

The first five works acquired thanks to the Kemper gift are monumentally scaled pieces by Franz Ackermann, Thomas Demand, Sergej Jensen, Charline von Heyl, and Corinne Wasmuht. Also on view will be significant works, already in the permanent collection, by Cosima von Bonin, Isa Genzken, Michel Majerus, Manfred Pernice and Wolfgang Tillmans, as well as a major installation, on loan for the exhibition, by Hans-Peter Feldmann. Together, these artists mediate the sweeping and sometimes paradoxical changes that have marked German life in the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as the worldwide effects, at once shattering and homogenizing, wrought by digital culture and technology. Several of these artists embrace conditions of instability and fragility without reference to particular contemporary or historical events. For example, Sergej Jensen creates delicate textile objects from found pieces of fabric, while Franz Ackermann explores the cultural centrality of the tourist as urban wanderer. "In Untitled (yet)", a large canvas from 2009, Ackermann depicts a cable car floating through a series of bright, though unidentifiable, topographies, suggesting both the growing ubiquity of worldwide travel and, in the work’s garish color scheme, the legacy of German Expressionism. Thomas Demand and Wolfgang Tillmans induce subtle unease with large-scale photographic works that are deliberately devoid of real world referents. For "Shed" (2006), Demand constructed, photographed and then destroyed a life-size paper model of a laundry room, thus unmooring the final image from any original source. Tillmans, meanwhile, produces photographs without the use of a camera. For "Silver 71" (2008), he exposed photosensitive paper to dirt, metal dust and light over a period of days. And for his "Wald (Briol II)" (2008), he photocopied a photograph of a man walking into a forest — a highly symbolic image in German art and culture, charged with shades of nationalism — then greatly enlarged the print, blurring its meaning both literally and metaphorically.


Corinne Wasmuht and Michel Majerus respond to the flickering effects of digitization with large-scale paintings that deny viewers a stable, unchanging perspective. Wasmuht’s "Llangancuo Falls" (2008) is an abstracted landscape in which layers of paint, slowly and meticulously applied, begin to simulate the glittering pixelization of the digital screen. Majerus’s "mm6" (2001) belongs to a series of paintings based on a digital film that mimics the electronic displays used at Berlin’s annual “Love Parade” (2001–07), a techno-music festival. Replacing the “Love Parade” logo with the words “Michel Majerus,” "mm6" recalls the flash of the electronic billboard yet also, paradoxically, fixes it in time, transforming the most ephemeral of images into monumental self-portraiture.

The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, sometimes referred to simply as "The Milly", is an art museum located on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, within the university's Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. It was founded in 1881 as the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts, and initially located in a building in downtown St. Louis. It is the oldest art museum west of the Mississippi river. Its collection was formed in large part by acquiring significant works by artists of the time, a legacy that continues today. Now one of the finest university collections in the United States, the Museum contains strong holdings of 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century European and American paintings, sculptures, prints, installations, and photographs. The collection also includes some Egyptian and Greek antiquities, Old Master prints, and the Wulfing Collection of approximately 14,000 ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine coins. The museum moved to its current home, designed by Pritzker Prize-winner Fumihiko Maki, in 2006. During its early years, the collection focused on contemporary American artists, notably William Merritt Chase. In 1905, Charles Parsons donated his private collection to the museum; this donation included pieces by Frederic Edwin Church, and established the museum as a major holder of contemporary American art.In 1906, the museum was relocated to the Palace of Fine Arts in Forest Park, where it was housed until 1909. In that year, the City Museum of Art was formed, and began to acquire works separately from the private university collection. The university collection would remain "on loan" to the public museum until 1960. In 1941, H.W. Janson joined the museum and began to focus on collecting contemporary European artwork, particularly examples of Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism. In order to finance this project, he organized the sale of over 600 objects. Notable acquisitions during this period include works by Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst and Juan Gris. Janson also arranged for a permanent home for the museum's collection, and in 1960, the museum moved to Steinberg Hall, located on the main university campus. At this time, the museum was also renamed as the Washington University Gallery of Art.Recently, the museum has continued to focus on the acquisition of contemporary works, including pieces by Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg and Jenny Holzer. In 2004, the museum was again renamed, this time as the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, as a division of the new Sam Fox School of Visual Art and Design. Two years later, in 2006, the museum moved to a new building adjacent to the old Steinberg Hall. The 65,000-square-foot (6,000 m2) expansion was designed by Fumihiko Maki, and is also home to the Washington University Art and Architecture library and the department of Art History and Archaeology. Visit the museum's website at ... www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu

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