GREGOR SCHNEIDER

‶I want to show a person who dies a natural death, or has just died a natural death. My goal is to show the beauty of death.” This statement from an interview with the artist in Paris, February 2008, taken out of context, led to angry protests at the time, but also to professions of sympathy, especially in the German press. The artist even received death threats. Yet nobody has ever seen this dying room. Now it is being shown for the first time in Innsbruck.
In the interview given to Heinz-Norbert Jocks (Kunstforum International 2008), Gregor Schneider describes at length the make-up of the art room constructed: ‶I’ve built a dying room that for me as a sculptor is the actual work of art. But it can also be used as just that, a room to die in. It replicates a room at the Museum Haus Lange/Esters (Krefeld), which in my eyes is one of the most sensitive and artistically challenging rooms that contemporary art has at its disposal. The room is a living room, awash with light, with large windows and a wooden floor. Conceived by Mies van der Rohe, it is an expression of spatial freedom for me ... The art room provides the dignity required so as to make dying and death visible also in public.” ‶Art, for me, has a deeply human ambition, in the most positive sense. Dying too can be art. Basically, a dying room is a personal design commission for the room and the environment we die in, we dissolve in, then to be dead. A design commission that lies in store for each of us.” The public depiction can free death from its social taboo. Is it possible to make dying and death a positive experience in analogy to birth?

Schneider, born in Rheydt (Mönchengladbach) in 1969, made a name for himself fifteen years ago with his Totes Haus ur, a late nineteenth-century terrace house in which the artist, over many years, created nightmarish suites of rooms, that initially were shown in various museums and then, in their entirety, were transplanted to the German Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001). For the installation Schneider received the Golden Lion. Since then, he has realised numerous projects internationally, including the CUBE planned for St. Mark’s Square in Venice, a replica of the Kaaba in Mecca at the Kunsthalle Hamburg, the labyrinth of rooms called Weisse Folter (lit. White Torture) at the K21 of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf , the Cells at Bondi Beach in Sydney, END at the Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach, and most recently it’s all Rheydt for the Durga Puja Festival in Kolkata.
To coincide with the dying room being shown at Kunstraum Innsbruck, Gregor Schneider’s newest project Punto Muerto (Dead End) will be presented at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo C2M in Madrid, where a monumental, intestine-like system of pipes with individual ur rooms pervades the museum, without visitors setting foot in the latter.

Gregor Schneider will be present at the press conference, at 2 p.m., on November 19. A documentary catalogue to go with the exhibition will appear in the new year.

Curator Veit Loers