Daimler Contemporary
Minimalism
in Germany. The Sixties II
Abstraction and Seriality, Zero, Concrete Tendencies
and Sculpture as Action
ActivitiesThe guided tours are in German, and are offered on every second Saturday. Each tour lasts one hour. The first tour each day deals with selected aspects of the current exhibition, the second with the Daimler Art Collection's large sculptures in Potsdamer Platz: Keith Haring, Francois Morellet, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Mark Platzdi Suvero, Jean Tinguely, Auke de Vries (venue: Daimler Contemporary). Discussions and lectures featuring artists, curators and critics will take place in the context of the exhibition. All these events will take place at Daimler Contemporary.
Saturday, April 7, Guided Tour
4 p.m.
Minimalism in Germany - A chronological tour
Böhm, Buchholz, Darboven, Glöckner, Goeritz, Mack, Posenenske, Roehr, Rückriem, Schene, Stromsky, Walther
Important trends in 1960s abstract art in Germany are presented at the beginning of the tour, and the emergence and development of Zero, Minimal Art, Concept Art and Seriality are addressed.
Monday, April 16, Talk in Haus Huth
7 p.m.
The artists - Hartmut Böhm and Helmut Stromsky
As artists, Hartmut Böhm and Helmut Stromsky can be seen as representing an independent German Minimalism. In his drawings, Böhm produces reliefs and room installations that have come into being since the 1960s, demonstrating a systematic and maximum reduction of formal resources. For decades, the work of sculptor and draughtsman Helmut Stromsky has been emphatically shaped by addressing Modern architecture. Analyzing space is fundamental to his work, and he investigates its qualities in his sculptures, drawings, photographs and architecture sculptures.
Saturday, April 21, Guided Tour
4 p.m.
Berlin, Dresden, Munich -influence from Constructivist avant-garde movements in Germany
Buchholz, Glöckner, Goeritz, Rückriem
What actually is Constructivism in art? Where does it come from, and when and how did it affect artists' output in Germany's cultural centers? The guided tour presents a German Constructivist's (Erich Buchholz's) sculptural concept and shows examples of Constructivist image concepts in the 1960s and 70s.
4 p.m.
Zero, Concretion, Concept - New image forms
Böhm, Posenenske, Roehr, Uecker, Walther
Seriality, progression, variability and modularity are characteristic concepts in the context of an individual German Minimalism. While Hartmut Böhm develops this from the point of view of Concept Art, in the early 1960s Franz Erhard Walther, Peter Roehr and Charlotte Posenenske tend to start with new image forms that were discussed in the context of the European Zero movement, thereby anticipating aspects of Conceptual Art and Process Art.
4 p.m.
The banality of material - the symbolism of material
Roehr, Rückriem, Schene, Posenenske, Walther
Visitors to the early Minimal Art exhibitions were confronted with roughly hewn stone slabs (Rückriem), plywood and PVC sheets (Schene), steel, cardboard, car lacquer (Posenenske), folded paper, brown paper and cotton fabrics (F. E. Walther). In this way, the demands of de-individualization and objectification are not infrequently formulated in terms of a shock effect on the material plane. Materials and genres with ideological baggage - pedestal, cast bronze, canvas, frame - were replaced by industrially mass-produced goods.5 p.m.
Potsdamer Platz sculpture tour
4 p.m.
Drawing: idea, concept and material for artworks
Darboven, Glöckner, Roehr, Rückriem, Walther
A discussion flared up in the sixties about art materials because new materials, often industrially produced, were being used. Critics such as Lucy Lippard, for example, talked about "dematerialization", but Benjamin Buchloh came up with "rematerialization". The guided tour explores these concepts with reference to drawings in the exhibition.
Saturday, June 16, Guided Tour
4 p.m.
"Sculpture as place" - the significance of architecture and outdoor space for minimalistic approaches
Buchholz, Glöckner, Goeritz
A three-dimensional work concept and an explicit relationship with the surrounding space lend an architectural dimension to minimalistic sculpture. As early as 1957, Goeritz was creating minimalistic tower sculptures rather like buildings, in central Mexico City. Posenenske's modular, industrially manufactured square tubes fit into the urban space almost mimetically.
Tuesday, June 19, Talk in Haus Huth
7 p.m.
Launch of our new publication "Minimalism in Germany. The Sixties"
Conversation and book launch with Paul Maenz, Rolf Ricke and Renate Wiehager
The Daimler Art Collection is presenting its fundamental research work on German Minimalism in a large-scale publication (approx. 500 pages, HatjeCantz). The exhibition catalogue is devoted to selected reductionist works from the period, with about 100 works by about 40 German artists, most of them owned by the Daimler Art Collection. Essays on minimalistic tendencies in architecture, literature, film and design establish a broader context beyond this. To mark this, Renate Wiehager, Paul Maenz and Rolf Ricke will offer an introduction to Concept, Minimal and Serialist tendencies in 1960s Germany.
Wedesnday, July 4, Talk in Haus Huth
7 p.m.
Art - Franz Erhard Walther
Franz Erhard Walther broke away from traditional ideas of image, sculpture and artists' materials in the 1960s. Walther experimented with processual structures and action forms such as folding, separating, gluing, packing, stacking, pasting, cutting or laying out with materials that were not considered artistic at the time such as hardboard, primer, paste, untreated cotton, brown paper or felt. His actions are always part of the work by definition, which means that the element of time acquires significance as sculptural material. Questions relating to presentation and the role of the viewer are also explored in conversation with Renate Wiehager.
4 p.m.
Image and space - the renewal of the spatial concept in Minimalism
Buchholz, Rückriem, Schene, Stromsky, Uecker, Walther
Erich Buchholz realized a first German spatial concept in his Berlin studio in 1922, and reconstructed this in 1966; Günther Uecker created three-dimensional ensembles made up of light and metal around 1965; Ulrich Rückriem and Helmut Stromsky examined the field of tension between drawing and sculpture; Eckhard Schene and Franz Erhard Walther explored visual and commercially based concepts of sculpture.
Saturday, July 21, Guided Tour
4 p.m.
Using grids - artistic process between structure and principle
Boehm, Posenenske, Roehr
The formal severity, lucidity and simplicity of the grid produce - as Roehr put it - "not a composition," but a structure that he defines as "an ordered pattern using like objects". Unlike work that is composed and organized hierarchically, artists see grid structures as free of hierarchy and anti-authoritarian.
Saturday, August 4, Guided Tour
4 p.m.
Artists go into production - socio-political approaches
Buchholz, Darboven, Posenenske, Roehr
Buchholz sympathized with the productivism of the November Group. Hanne Darboven formulated her social criticism by making an emancipated concept of the age visible, Posenenske and Roehr take up an industrial aesthetic in their series and use them to express ideas of process-oriented art production.
Saturday, August 18, Guided Tour
4 p.m.
The activated viewer - sculptural approaches based on action
Buchholz, Posenenske, Schene, Walther
The idea of recipients as constitutive components of the work of art was already present in the thinking that led to minimalistic sculpture. Posenenske's constantly re-arranging 'square tubes' show a markedly processual character here. Walther's 'Werksätze' (Work Sets) are accompanied by instructions for involving viewers physically and for the 'use' of his works.
Thursday, August 23, Talk in Haus Huth
The curators - Mattijs Visser (Zero Foundation, Düsseldorf) and Tobias Hoffmann (Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt)
Both the Museum für Konkrete Kunst in Ingolstadt and the Zero Foundation in Düsseldorf are unique exhibition spaces in Germany, with a very specific thrust. The focus of the Daimler Art Collection has much in common with these two institutions. Directors Mattijs Visser and Tobias Hoffmann discuss different museum formats and exhibitions concepts and their own work as curators with Renate Wiehager.
Saturday, September 1, Guided Tour
4 p.m.
Minimalism - Minimal Art. Reduction as a global and local phenomenon.
Darboven, Posenenske, Rückriem, Walther
Many post-war artists in Germany saw themselves as heirs to a cultural landscape that had been destroyed. The centre of the international art stage had now shifted to New York. Darboven, Posenenske, Rückriem and Walther traveled to the United States to learn, exhibit and exchange.5 p.m.
Potsdamer Platz sculpture tour