Europe’s Leading Art Exhibition And Event Center ~ The Martin Gropius Bau In Berlin

Written by Elizabeth Leach Monday, 07 November 2011 22:10

The Martin Gropius Bau (Martin Gropius building, or MGB) is considered one of Berlin’s most magnificent buildings with its combined classical and Renaissance features. A short walk from Potsdamer Platz, it doubles as one of Europe’s top international exhibition and event venues. With a constant flow of half a million visitors per year and over 20 large art photography and cultural exhibitions, the MGB is an established Berlin cultural institution. First inaugurated in 1881 as a Museum for the Applied Arts, the building was designed by Martin Gropius, great uncle of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus movement and Heino Schmieden. After World War I, the building housed the Museum of Pre and Early History and the East Asian Art Collection. Damaged, like most Berlin buildings during World War II and not deemed worthy of preservation, the building was almost demolished to make way for an urban motorway were it not for the intervention of Walter Gropius. Given protected heritage site status in 1966, its reconstruction and restoration only began in 1978 when it was also renamed Martin Gropius Bau. After reconstruction of the exterior by Winnetou Kampmann, it reopened in 1981 as an exhibition venue, remaining directly adjacent to the Berlin Wall until 1990 and accessible only via a rear entrance as the main doorway remained unusuable because of its proximity to the Wall. After German reunification and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a further spate of restoration and alteration was necessary and the Federal Government commissioned architects Hilmer, Sattler and Albrecht to carry out the work. Completed in 2000, the works included air conditioning and the redesigning of the north entrance as the main entrance to the building. Today the Martin Gropius Bau building is the central venue for the Berliner Festspiele and its partners – the 50 year old umbrella cultural institution which runs many of Berlin’s international festivals and cultural events including the Musikfest Berlin, the International Literature Festival and JazzFest Berlin. The Gropius Bau hosts over 20 large art, photography and cultural exhibitions every year. Among the building’s special features are its vast exhibition and reception spaces. These include the 300m north vestibule with a glass dome, the 600m Atrium on the ground floor with a surrounding gallery where vast functions for up to 750 guests can be held. Other facilities are conference rooms and a 200-seat cinema. Just off the central Foyer area on the ground floor are the Café and Bookshop. In the high-ceilinged café meals and refreshments are available and in the warmer months food is served in the garden at the back of the building. Visit the MGB website at … http://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/de/aktuell/festivals/11_gropiusbau/mgb_start.php

The exhibition program at the Martin Gropius Bau merges contemporary arts and culture with a stunning setting. It is located directly adjacent to a stretch of the Berlin Wall which stood here until 1990 and next to the Topography of Terror (an open-air exhibition documenting the site around today’s Niederkirchner Strasse and Wilhelm Strasse where the headquarters of the main institutions of the Nazi terror apparatus were located). Sensational exhibitions such as ‘Art Spiegelman: Kisses From New York’ (2003), Stanley Kubrick (2005), ‘Egypt's Sunken Treasures’ (2006), ‘Rebecca Horn: Drawings, Sculptures, Installations, Films 1964-2006’ (2006/2007), ‘Man Ray: Unconcerned But Not Indifferent’ (2008), ‘Bauhaus’ and “Futurism” (2009), or the Mexico Exhibitions. ‘Frida Kahlo: Retrospective’ and ‘Teotihuacan: Mexico's Mysterious Pyramid City’ (2010) have made the Martin-Gropius-Bau one of the leading international exhibition centers. Unusual thematic exhibitions on cultural history, often with spectacular archaeological finds and latest research results, with the fields of contemporary art and photography are the main pillars of the program of the Martin-Gropius-Bau. Outstanding artist biographies also focus on how current positions. Museums around the world, government institutions and private lenders to open it - usually the first and often only time - their treasuries and send their most important works on the trip to Berlin to be exhibited at the Martin Gropius Bau.

Currently on show (until May 29 2011) at the Martin Gropius Bau is “Compass: Drawings from the Museum of Modern Art in New York”. In 2004, 212 modern works of art from New York triggered a veritable rush to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The “MoMA in Berlin” became a legendary artistic happening, with over 1.2 million visitors and the longest line ever in front of a museum. The ‘Compass’ exhibition in Berlin offers viewers an extraordinary selection of modern art drawings from the collection of the Judith Rothschild Foundation, which was acquired by New York's Museum of Modern Art in 2005. The collection consists of nearly 2600 contemporary works on paper, which were created by over 600 artists. The collection was initiated during the 1950s and was completed in 2005. It therefore represents practically all of the major manifestations that took place in this media over the course of five entire decades. Many prominent 20th-century artists are represented, including Lee Bontecou, Joseph Beuys, Jasper Jones, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Edward Ruscha, Robert Rauschenberg, Martin Kippenberger , Elisabeth Peyton, Christian Holstad, John Currin, Kai Althoff, Arturo Herrera, Lucy McKenzie, Nick Mauss, Mona Hatoun, Amelie Wulff, Seb Patane, Sherrie Levine, Paulina Olowska and Paul McCarthy. The exhibition title Compass refers to the collection's ambition to cover and discover geographically distinct artistic centres (through the navigational compass), as well as its attention to modes of making the compass as a drafting tool. The collection reflects two trends: the representational and the abstract shape, minimal and conceptual approaches between 1950 and 2005. The diverse exhibition program of the Martin Gropius Bau, developed in collaboration with partners such as the National Museums in Berlin, the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn, and the German Historical Museum, every year hostover 600,000 visitors.

Future exhibitions at the MGB include ‘When the Curtain Falls: The Photographs of Margarita Broich” from 18 March to 30 May 2011. As an actress, Margarita Broich is one of the greats, however, she is not as well known as a photographer. For the first time the Martin-Gropius-Bau presents a group of works by Margarita Broich, including more than 60 portraits of artists, including Ben Becker, Kate Winslet, Veronica Ferres, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Christoph Schlingensief, Thomas Quasthoff and more. Margarita Broich was born 1960 in Neuwied, studied photo design in Dortmund and worked as a theater photographer at the Bochum Schauspielhaus under Claus Peymann, before she studied acting at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Since then, she has appeared in numerous German-language theater and television productions, working with directors such as Claus Peymann, Robert Wilson and Christoph Schlingensief. André Kertész – Photographs’ from June 11th to September 11th 2011 will present a major retrospective of over 300 examples of this Hungarian born photographers work. With images such as "swimmer under water" (1917), "Chez Mondrian" (1926) or "Fork" (1929) Kertész earned a permanent place in the photographic history of the 20th Century. It's not only his outstanding formal compositions that earned him great respect, but the inspired surreal poetry with which he recorded seemingly simple things and situations. His innovative photographic sense inspired many of his colleagues and successors, Brassaï trained with him and Henri Cartier-Bresson was influenced by him. Later in the year, from 26th August to 24th October 2011, the MGB will present the first ever German retrospective of the works of the world famous Japanese artist Hokusai (1760-1849). More than 350 loans, mostly from Japan, will feature in this exhibition. Seiji Nagata, the most important Japanese expert on the work of Hokusai, curated the exhibition, which can only be seen in Berlin, where it will form part of the "150 years of friendship between Germany and Japan" celebrations.