In the art of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (born in 1965 in Strasbourg, lives in Paris and Rio de Janeiro), everything revolves around experiences of and reflections on spaces and times. Using often minimal resources, she evokes places, people, and things that exist in one form or another in our collective memory. Her themes may be as diverse as the influence of hippiedom during the 1970s, the film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the urban utopia of Brasilia, King Ludwig II, psychoanalysis, a tropical rainstorm, or the prospects for the year 2066.
Using just a few elements, she constructs spaces, uses specially created sounds, produces films, or appears herself as a historical figure. A recurring point of reference in all of these activities is literature. It is not a question of creating the perfect illusion of a certain moment in time or a certain individual, but instead of a state of suspension between recognition and astonishment, memory and speculation. The exhibition title names two specific works, at the same time suggesting that for Gonzalez-Foerster, time is a flowing continuum.
The exhibition in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is organized jointly with the Centre George Pompidou in Paris. With approximately 15 labyrinthine spaces occupying two exhibition halls of the K20, it is the largest exhibition devoted to this artist to date, and offers a retrospective overview of her work of the past 25 years.
A spectacular supplement to the Paris version of the exhibition is the installation K.2066 in the Grabbe Halle of the K20. Animated by the extraordinary dimensions of the space, the artist decided to create a new version of a work she realized in 2008 for the gigantic Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London. The space becomes a sanctuary for works of art and people after life changes caused by years of rain. Alongside numerous bunkbeds on which books featuring negative and utopian themes are laid out opened for reading purposes, sculptures from the vicinity of the Kunstsammlung NRW have been brought to safety here: works by Henry Moore and Alexander Calder, Claes Oldenburg and Joel Shapiro, Johannes Brus and Katharina Fritsch, each enlarged in scale by one third.
The second supplemental work relates to the opening and terminus of the exhibition: it begins with a passageway, now immersed entirely in a pink that is familiar from the façade of Benrath Palace in Düsseldorf. In the mid-1980s, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster studied briefly at the city’s art academy. At the end of the exhibition, visitors again encounter a wall covered in this color. Hanging on it is a painting by Paul Klee, Black Prince (1927), from the collection of the Kunstsammlung. This work plays a central role in a story by the Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas, who is not only a good friend of the artist’s, but who also occasionally mentions her and her works in his texts.
This exhibition of works by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster calls attention to a creative personality who has been neglected in Germany to date, who together with other French artists such as Pierre Huyghe and Phillipe Parreno, but also international figures such as Douglas Gordon, Liam Gillick, and Rikrit Tiravanija, has shaped contemporary art globally in decisive ways since
the 1990s.
An exhibition organized by the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in association with the Stiftung Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.