Albertinum: Heimo Zobernig. Piet Mondrian

Ausstellungsansicht "Heimo Zobernig. Piet Mondrian. Eine räumliche Aneignung", Installation im Lichthof

Heimo Zobernig, Piet Mondrian: A spatial appropriation

Taking designs for interiors produced during the Modernist period as a starting point, contemporary artists are presenting their own spatial concepts and exhibition designs in the Albertinum. Since the mid-1980s the artist Heimo Zobernig has been experimenting with the design of interiors and the presentation of art, as well as with geometric abstractions like those of Piet Mondrian. In a series of paintings created successively from the year 2000 onwards, he has used materials such as acrylic paint and tape to investigate the grid structure as an avantgarde form of expression since the Modernist era.

Exhibition Site Albertinum

DATES 02/03/2019—02/06/2019

In the Albertinum he is presenting a selection of recent paintings from this series as well as a new spatial installation in the atrium. The basis for this work consists of design drawings produced by Piet Mondrian in 1926 for a room in the home of the Dresden art collector Ida Bienert, which are on view in the exhibition entitled “Visionary Spaces” in the Albertinum. Whereas Mondrian’s design was never actually implemented, Zobernig’s installation in the original dimensions of that room can be entered and experienced as a cubic sculpture.

**Heimo Zobernig in Kooperation mit Eric Kläring, Piet Mondrian. Eine räumliche Aneignung, 2019** Isometrischer Plan der Raum-Installation für den Lichthof des Albertinum

**Piet Mondrian, Farbentwurf für den Salon der Ida Bienert, (Axonometrie I), 1926** Deckfarben, Tusche, Bleistift, 37,6 x 56 cm, Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

Innenansicht einer Rauminstallation, die aus verschiedenfarbigen Tafeln besteht — **Ausstellungsansicht "Heimo Zobernig. Piet Mondrian. Eine räumliche Aneignung", Installation im Lichthof**

**Ausstellungsansicht "Heimo Zobernig. Piet Mondrian. Eine räumliche Aneignung" im Gelenkraum**

Demonstration Rooms: Interventions by Céline Condorelli, Kapwani Kiwanga, Judy Radul

As part of the Demonstration Rooms project, Céline Condorelli, Kapwani Kiwanga and Judy Radul have been invited to reflect on the presentation of the collection in the Albertinum. In various rooms of the museum they have developed artistic interventions that interrogate customary viewing habits and spatial perception. Hence, this project builds upon the ideas of El Lissitzky who in 1926 created a “Demonstration Room” for the Dresden International Art Exhibition, through which he sought to make the viewing of art a more active process by taking an unconventional approach to interior design. Even today, the progressive designs of Mondrian and Lissitzky still have the potential to inspire innovative thinking.

Céline Condorelli

While this is incorporated in the exhibition tour of the second floor, the custom furniture piece designed for the Albertinum, "Spatial Composition 12", is exhibited as a usable and at the same time sculptural seating area together with six drawings and historic exhibition views of the Albertinum.

Ausstellungsansicht "Demonstrationsräume. Interventionen von Céline Condorelli" — The fabric for the seating areas cite African patterns, whose colors in Condorelli’s interpretation all come from color design of different historical exhibition spaces. Lesser known today, is that plants often stood in exhibition spaces. The artist shows a selection of such plants in her series of drawings "Plant Study".

Kapwani Kiwanga

Kiwanga positions an illuminated, gridded cuboid centrally in the space. The intensity of the light is based on weather data from Egypt and illuminates an arrangement of differently colored, large panels that borrow the colors from two paintings from Slevogt’s series ("Sudanese Women" and "Morning near Luxor").

They range from facets of the bright blue of the sky, to ochre colored, sandy earth tones up until those colors used to define the skin of two Sudanese women. From a decolonial perspective, Kiwanga focuses on the relationship of a distant real space to an image space defined by colors and the exhibition space as well as related questions of perception.

Judy Radul

The Albertinum viewing depot which Radul takes as a site of intervention presents a selection of the sculpture collection. The mainly figurative sculptures are viewable through large windows but viewers may not enter the space. The front-facing arrangement of the sculptures reduces them to a frontal picture seen through the windows.

In several places in the depot, Radul has placed video cameras, controlled with her custom motion control system, that allow other perspectives on the sculptures. A live mix of these video images are played on a video monitor in the space of the viewer. The monitor is part of an installation of an archive of plinths from the Albertinium storage. In turn, these plinths are put on pedestals based on the gaudy color range of highlighters. The result is a system that visualizes the hierarchies of seeing and showing as well as the associated relationship with the observer.

Publication to the special exhibition

Demonstration Rooms. Artistic Confrontations with Space and Display at the Albertinum

Editor: Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Isabelle Busch, Kathleen Reinhardt, Hilke Wagner, 143 pages, 2020, Spector Books OHG (publishing house), ISBN 978-3-95905-352-5, 28 €