1997 – 2012
Deutsche Guggenheim
Between 1997 and 2012, the Deutsche Guggenheim, a unique cooperation between Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, presented 61 important exhibitions with a focus on twentieth- and twenty-first century art.
Each year, the Deutsche Guggenheim presented four first-rate exhibitions with a focus on twentieth- and twenty-first century art.
Encompassing 350 square meters, the exhibition area was an ideal space for a detailed focus on particular themes, as well as on groups of works created by individual artists or typical of specific trends. The exhibition hall was transformed again and again, offering surprises with fresh spatial aspects. The multifaceted program of the Deutsche Guggenheim, which had been developed through intense collaboration between the two partners, was comprised of three major elements: Alongside the exhibitions devoted to individual artists or themes and enriched by works on loan from international museums, institutions, and private collections, the gallery presented each year an exhibition with works from the Deutsche Bank Collection. The most unique aspect of the concept, however, consisted of the presentation of site-specific works commissioned for the exhibition hall.
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November 15, 2012 – February 17, 2013
Visions of Modernity: Impressionist and Modern Collections from the Guggenheim Foundation
Featuring works by Paul Cézanne, Robert Delaunay, Vasily Kandinsky, and Pablo Picasso, among others, this exhibition explores the intriguing parallels between a diverse group of art enthusiasts whose lives intersected over several decades. Ranging from museum founders Solomon R. Guggenheim and Hilla Rebay, to visionaries Katherine S. Dreier and Peggy Guggenheim, and eminent gallerists Karl Nierendorf and Justin K. Thannhauser, these six collectors brought some of the most significant artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to light. Over the years, their personal compilations have been incorporated into one comprehensive array of avant-garde art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Their foresight and connoisseurship helped to define the scope of the Guggenheim’s holdings of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and modern art.
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July 6 – October 21, 2012
Gabriel Orozco: Asterisms
Gabriel Orozco’s Asterisms is a two-part sculptural and photographic installation comprising thousands of items of detritus the artist has gathered at two sites—a playing field near his home in New York and a protected coastal biosphere in Baja California Sur, Mexico, that is also the repository for flows of industrial and commercial waste from across the Pacific Ocean. In the exhibition, the two related bodies of work play off each other in a provocative oscillation between the macro and the micro, invoking several of the artist’s recurring motifs, including traces of erosion, poetic encounters with mundane materials, and the ever-present tension between nature and culture.
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April 26 – June 18, 2012
Roman Ondák: Do Not Walk Outside This Area – Deutsche Bank “Artist of the Year” 2012
With his installations, performances, and drawings, the Slovakian artist Roman Ondák investigates the borders between art and everyday life. Ondák’s interventions usually occur in places primarily devoted to art: in museums and galleries, at biennials and art fairs. He changes or stages situations such that expectations and conventions begin to totter. The path through the installation Do Not Walk Outside This Area leads via the original wing of a Boeing 737-500, which enjoins two exhibition rooms like a bridge. To reach the second part of the show, the visitor walks over the wing entering the unreachable surface that otherwise can only be seen out of the window of an aircraft cabin. Like a red thread, the theme of travel and danger runs through Ondák’s works on paper and wall works on view in Berlin.
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October 28, 2011 – January 16, 2012
Pawel Althamer: ALMECH
Since the early 1990s, Paweł Althamer has developed a singularly collaborative mode of art making. These endeavors have generated distinct bodies of artwork as well as diverse and unique social experiences for his collaborators and audiences alike. Now, for his Deutsche Guggenheim commission, Althamer has fused these two trends in his practice, performance, and sculpture, creating an exhibition-in-progress that confronts visitors with a site of active production rather than passive reflection. Relocating a branch of his father’s factory in Wesoła to Berlin, Althamer has set up machines and workers in the exhibition space, where they produce sculptural portraits of museumgoers as well as staff members. With Almech, Althamer has fashioned both a tribute to his father’s company and a massive group self-portrait defining the Deutsche Guggenheim through the individuals who frequent it
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July 8 – October 9, 2011
Once Upon a Time: Fantastic Narratives in Contemporary Video
Once Upon a Time focuses on how fantastic stories and modern fairytales are represented in video art today. Based on important video artworks from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum collection, the exhibition Once Upon a Time investigates how contemporary artists adapt motives and narrative techniques from myths, fables, and fairy tales to mirror current social phenomena and events in recent history. Once Upon a Time features a selection of video installations and single-channel works by Francis Alÿs, Cao Fei, Pierre Huyghe, Aleksandra Mir, Mika Rottenberg, and Janaina Tschäpe that explore this practice in contemporary art.
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April 15 – June 19, 2011
Yto Bararda: Riffs – Deutsche Bank “Artist of the Year” 2022
Yto Barrada’s work—photographs, films, publications, installations and sculptures—engage with the peculiar situation of her hometown of Tangier, Morocco. In her first series A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project, Barrada depicts Tangier where postcolonial history has materialized one of its deadends. Her recent project Iris Tingitana extends this inquiry to the fast-growing modern city, where new construction meets the landscape of northern Morocco. The show Riffs is conceived as a construction in three-dimensional space and a deliberate juxtaposition of new and past works. It plays on the varying distances between Barrada’s lens and her subjects, displaying the full range of media in which she works.
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January 28 – March 30, 2011
Agathe Snow – All Access World
Agathe Snow’s work balances visions of apocalypse and entropic decay with an earnest faith in the redemptive power of human ingenuity and community. Her performances, ranging from carnivalesque banquets to her legendary dance marathons, operate as scenarios for uninhibited social exchange, always enacted with a fierce conceptual commitment. Performative elements and elaborate fictions also underpin Snow’s sculptural installations, which she fashions from an exuberant array of debris scavenged from local streets. With the transformative addition of paint, plaster, and collage, she coaxes her found objects and their attendant histories into evocative new forms that frequently develop and mutate over the course of an exhibition. For her forthcoming commission All Access World, Snow will present a characteristically multivalent project that explores the rich thematic valences of monuments and landmarks around the world.
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October 30, 2004 – January 16, 2005
John Baldessari: SOMEWHERE BETWEEN ALMOST RIGHT AND NOT QUITE (WITH ORANGE)
Influenced by Marcel Duchamp, the American artist John Baldessari rose to prominence in the late 1960s, combining Pop Arts’s use of imagery from the mass media with Conceptual art’s use of language to create a unique body of work that has become a hallmark of postmodern art. For this commission, Somewhere Between Almost Right and Not Quite (with Orange), Baldessari has created thirteen large-scale works. Using stills from numerous sources, Baldessari paints over crucial information in the images, essentially withholding information. Orange—a color between yellow and red—is dominant in this project. Baldessari revels in juxtapositions: His imagery conveys harmony and discord, security and disruption—and he focuses on the voids left between these extremes, the uncomfortable existence of “betweenness.”
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October 22, 2010 – January 10, 2011
Color Fields
With Color Fields, the Deutsche Guggenheim presents a unique selection of prominent representatives of Color Field painting. Large-scale canvases featuring flat expanses of color often stained into the support characterize one of the signatures of postwar abstract painting and are exemplified by the work of such artists as Helen Frankenthalter, Morris Louis, Frank Stella, and Kenneth Noland. The Guggenheim Museum featured them in landmark exhibitions. In 1961, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presented the exhibition American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists. The artists featured in Color Fields were among the many included in these past presentations who were working against the grain of late 1950s Abstract Expressionism and moving abstraction in new directions, all while American Pop art dominated the American art scene
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June 26 – October 10, 2010
Being Singular Plural: Moving Images from India
Being Singular Plural unites a selection of recent films and videos that investigate the individual nature of life and the moving image by some of the most innovative and rigorous media practitioners today: Shumona Goel and Shai Heredia, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya of Desire Machine Collective, Amar Kanwar, and Kabir Mohanty. All of these artists employ film and video to formulate complex aesthetic, technological, and sociopolitical statements that question the often-bombastic cinematic strategies, methods, forms, and subjects of the global media industry. Being Singular Plural thus celebrates and explores the unobtrusive and the unseen. The films and videos presented call upon the viewer to reflect upon customary ways of seeing and the classical categorizations of fact and fiction, art and film, objectivity and subjectivity.
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April 30 – June 13, 2010
Wangechi Mutu: My Dirty Little Heaven – Deutsche Bank “Artist of the Year” 2010
With the “Artist of the Year” award, Deutsche Bank opens a new chapter of its global commitment to art. Wangechi Mutu was selected on the recommendation of the Global Art Advisory Board.
Mutu’s works are captivating due to their unique blend of horror and beauty, surreal poetry and social criticism. In extravagant collages, ink drawings, site-specific wall pieces, and installations, the artist, who was trained as a sculptor and anthropologist, processes mass-media and scientific imagery. Her work addresses issues related to a black female identity situated between Western consumerist culture, African politics, and postcolonial history.
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January 23 – April 11, 2010
Utopia Matters
Utopia has long been a subject of investigation for artists, as well as a model for artistic collectives. In the early 1800s, artistic brotherhoods inspired by the medieval guild emerged, pursued the utopian tenets of communal work, and retreated to the ideal communities they established. By the end of the nineteenth century, utopian groups flourished. Utopia Matters is divided into nine sections addressing movements from the early nineteenth century through 1933, and examines the evolution of utopian ideas in modern Western artistic thought and practice. The movements addressed will be The Primitifs, the Nazarenes, the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris and Arts and Crafts, Cornish Art Colony, Neo-Impressionism, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Russian Constructivism.
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October 28, 2009 – January 6, 2010
Julie Mehretu – Grey Area
Julie Mehretu is celebrated for her large-scale paintings and drawings that layer abstract forms with familiar architectural imagery. Inspired by a multitude of sources including historical photographs, urban planning grids, Modernist painting, and graffiti, these semi-abstract works explore the intersections of power, history, dystopia, and the built environment and their impact on the formation of personal and communal identity. For the Deutsche Guggenheim, Mehretu produced a remarkable suite of seven paintings that ruminate on her impressions of Berlin.
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March 15 – May 14, 2000
Hiroshi Sugimoto – Portraits
Hiroshi Sugimoto occupies an exceptional position in the world of photography, combining poetic imagination and noble elegance with conceptual complexity. Work groups that deal with topics such as dioramas, cinemas or ocean views determine his photographic oeuvre. As a commissioned work for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Sugimoto photographed in the famous wax figurine cabinets in London, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. With large-format portraits of historical figures in the style of classical paintings, the artist interrogates image and reality. A highlight of the exhibition is the multipart photo tableau of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper.
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August 15 – October 16, 2009
Abstraction and Empathy
Drawn from Deutsche Bank’s extensive collection of works on paper, this exhibition takes its inspiration, and its title, from Wilhelm Worringer’s seminal 1907 book Abstraction and Empathy. In this text, Worringer identifies two opposing tendencies pervading the history of art from ancient times through the Enlightenment. He claims that in societies experiencing periods of anxiety and intense spirituality, artistic production tends toward a flat, crystalline “abstraction,” while cultures that are oriented toward science and the physical world, are dominated by more naturalistic, embodied styles, which he grouped under the term “empathy.” Organized by Carmen Giménez, the exhibition Abstraction and Empathy brings together works by Josef Albers, Michael Buthe, Blinky Palermo, and Thomas Schütte. Augmenting these artists’ works is a small selection of key loans that sketch the path of Worringer’s influence through paintings by Philip Guston, Paul Klee, and Piet Mondrian.
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May 23 – August 2, 2009
Imi Knoebel: Ich Nicht / Imi Knoebel: Enduros
This year’s exhibition conceived by Deutsche Bank is devoted to the complex oeuvre of the Düsseldorf artist Imi Knoebel. The work of the former student of Joseph Beuys, with its pioneering exploration of form and color, is today more momentous than ever. The exhibition is divided into two “acts.” The first part presents new works by the artist executed between 2005 and 2009. Under the title ICH NICHT (NOT I), they give a concise answer to Barnett Newman’s question Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? ENDUROS, the second part of the show, constitutes a retrospective of Knoebel’s work from 1968 to 2005, covering the entire spectrum of the artist’s abstract formal vocabulary. The exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin is being mounted in close collaboration with the artist and in cooperation with the Neue Nationalgalerie, where Imi Knoebel’s installation Zu Hilfe, zu Hilfe… is opening at the same time.
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March 7 – May 10, 2009
Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s
At the end of the 1960s, a number of young artists working in the United States began making realist paintings based directly on photographs. With meticulous detail, they portrayed the objects, people, and places that defined both urban and suburban contemporary American life. Unlike their contemporaries the Pop artists, the Photorealists did not present their ubiquitous, and in many cases mundane, subject matter in an ironic manner. Rather, they stayed more or less faithful to the mechanical reproductions that served as their point of departure. Picturing America features works by Robert Bechtle, Charles Bell, Tom Blackwell, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Ralph Goings, Ron Kleeman, Richard McLean, Malcolm Morley, John Salt, and Ben Schonzeit.
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November 30, 2008 – February 1, 2009
Anish Kapoor: Memory
Anish Kapoor is one of the most celebrated sculptors of our time. Since the early 1980s, his investigation of notions of scale, volume, color, and materiality has redefined contemporary sculpture. Kapoor is best known for his explorations into the concept of the void. Deutsche Guggenheim’s ambitious commission titled Memory is an intervention in the gallery that prevents any one complete viewing or experience of the work. Fabricated using twenty-four tons of rusting Cor-Ten steel, with industrial tiles and bolts exposed, the sculpture loosly resembles a balloon or egg-shaped object. In negotiating this inaccessibility to view the work in its entirety or walk around it as an object, a viewer’s memory becomes a methodology for understanding.
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July 5 – October 5, 2008
Freeway Balconies
With Freeway Balconies, the Deutsche Guggenheim follows the precedent set in the exhibition The Vanity of Allegory, curated by the artist Douglas Gordon together with Nancy Spector in 2005. Acclaimed American artist Collier Schorr, whose multimedia practice explores appropriated identities and performance, has organized a group exhibition that is at once a self-portrait and a riveting display of some of the most vital trends in U.S.-based contemporary art. The title, Freeway Balconies, affectionately borrowed from 1960s poet laureate Allen Ginsberg, refers to the meeting place of spectacle and voyeurism in American culture, combining frenetic energy with still observation.
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April 26 – June 22, 2008
Freisteller: The Villa Romana Fellows 2008
The Villa Romana Fellowship, awarded to exceptional young talents since 1905, includes a stipend and a residency program in the artists’ house in Florence. For the first time, the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin will introduce the recipients of the Villa Romana Fellowship 2008—Dani Gal, Julia Schmidt, Aslı Sungu, and Clemens von Wedemeyer, featuring their new paintings, installations, and videos.
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February 2 – April 13, 2008
True North
True North explores the legacy of Northern Romantic landscape painting in contemporary video and photography. The works in this exhibition by Stan Douglas, Olafur Eliasson, Elger Esser, Thomas Flechtner, Roni Horn, Armin Linke, and Orit Raff, unlike their Romantic antecedents, are largely historically and politically self-reflexive, and call into question the notion of a sublime, unchangeable North—a notion visualized most famously in the heroic images of nineteenth-century landscape photography and painting, both in Europe and in North America. True North examines our multivalent and unstable relationships to Northern sites, which have been inextricably linked with twentieth-century narratives of technological and cultural “progress.”
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November 3, 2007 – January 20, 2008
Jeff Wall: Exposure
Succeeding his large retrospectives of the past years, Jeff Wall will present a select group of new works at the Deutsche Guggenheim in a special exhibition commissioned specifically for Berlin entitled Jeff Wall: Exposure.
Four new, large-scale, gelatin-silver prints are at the center of the installation. Three of the photographs take a cinematographic approach—they are staged and composed, despite the fact that they were shot on the street rather than in a studio. Each composition realistically depicts individuals who are in difficult circumstances typical of contemporary society. The fourth work in this new group of photographs is a documentary image that does not include figures.
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July 14 – October 14, 2007
Phoebe Washburn – Regulated Fool’s Milk Meadow
New York-based artist Phoebe Washburn uses common and discarded materials to create sculptures that appear makeshift. Washburn’s choice of material is often considered as a political statement, as a reflection of a society of excess, but she is far more interested in transforming discarded and ignored materials into something vivacious. Her constructions proliferating into the gigantic reflect the extreme growth of present-day cities and touch on themes of global relevance: ecological sustainability, renewable energy, recycling, social utopias. Her commissioned work for Deutsche Guggenheim is to be seen in this context, a kind of plant factory titled Regulated Fool’s Milk Meadow, documenting cultivation, production, and withering as an endless conveyor belt of transience.
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April 28 – June 24, 2007
Affinities: New Acquisitions Deutsche Bank Collection
AFFINITIES presents the latest acquisitions for the Deutsche Bank Collection in dialogue with masterpieces from the Guggenheim Museum and highlights from the collection itself. Works on loan from the St. Petersburg Hermitage, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Dakis Joannou Foundation in Athens will also be shown at the exhibition hall on Unter den Linden. The exhibition presents art masterpieces of the last century and the present one. The spectrum ranges from Henri Matisse and Vasily Kandinsky to established contemporary artists such as Hiroshi Sugimoto and Louise Bourgeois, and also includes newcomers to the international art scene such as Kai Althoff and Diamantes Sotiropoulos.
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January 27 – April 15, 2007
Divisionism/Neo-Impressionism: Arcadia and Anarchy
This exhibition is the first dedicated specifically to the exploration of the optically vibrant paintings executed by the Italian Divisionists and their relationship to Neo-Impressionism. Arcadia and Anarchy will reassess the prevailing perspective on Divisionism. By placing the Italian movement in an international context the exhibition will underscore the autonomy the Italians had from their European counterparts and their importance as pioneers of modernism. The emphasis will be on the major protagonists of Italian Divisionism, among them Giovanni Segantini, Angelo Morbelli, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, Emilio Longoni, and Gaetano Previati, whose works will be shown together with a selection of paintings by artists such as Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Camille Pissarro, and Henri-Edmond Cross.
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October 28, 2006 – January 12, 2007
All in the Present Must BeTtransformed: Matthew Barney und Joseph Beuys
All in the Present Must Be Transformed: Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys will examine key affinities between the two artists, who, though separated by generation and geography, share many aesthetic and conceptual concerns. The exhibition will focus on their metaphoric use of materials, their interest in metamorphosis, their employment of narrative structures, and the relationship between action and documentation in their work. The show will pair a selection of drawings and vitrines by both artists, as well as Barney’s multipart sculpture Chrysler Imperial (2002) from CREMASTER 3 with Beuys’ installation Terremoto (1981).
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August 26 – October 15, 2006
Cai Guo-Qiang: Head On
Cai Guo-Qiang, born in 1957 in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, is one of the leading contemporary artists. The practice of the New York-based artist draws on a wide variety of symbols, narratives, traditions, and materials, including fengshui, Chinese medicine, and gunpowder. For the show at the Deutsche Guggenheim, the first solo presentation of his work in Germany, Cai Guo-Qiang developed a special concept that reflects the diversity of his oeuvre and establishes a unique link to the city of Berlin.
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May 13 – August 10, 2006
Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim
Art of Tomorrow, the first exhibition dedicated to the entire career of Hilla Rebay, opens at the Deutsche Guggenheim. In 1939, the German-born artist Rebay was a cofounder of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—originally named the Museum of Non-Objective Painting— as well as its first curator and director. The exhibition comprises a significant selection of Rebay’s works on paper and non-objective paintings and includes the formal portrait of Solomon R. Guggenheim (1861–1949) that first brought the artist and the patron together. Also included are key works by colleagues such as Rudolf Bauer, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, László Moholy-Nagy, Otto Nebel, Ben Nicholson, and Kurt Schwitters.
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February 4 – April 23, 2006
Hanne Darboven – Hommage à Picasso
Hanne Darboven’s installation Hommage à Picasso engulfs the viewer in 9,720 of the artist’s signature sheets of paper with handwritten numeric writing, which are encased in 270 framed panels and document the last decade of the twentieth century. She combines this record of the turn of the millennium with a framed lithograph of a Picasso’s 1955 painting Seated Figure in Turkish Costume, a series of purchased and commissioned sculptures ranging from a bronze, Roman-style bust of Picasso to birch-twig donkeys made in Poland, and the newly-produced musical work Opus 60 adapted from her score.
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October 29, 2005 – January 15, 2006
William Kentridge – Black Box / Chambre Noire
In the 1990s, William Kentridge made his international breakthrough with animated films composed from his charcoal and pastel drawings. He is also renowned for his theater-based work—complex multimedia performances which combine puppets, animation, projection, and live action. His work focuses on the history of his home country, South Africa, during apartheid and the post-apartheid era. As a commissioned work for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Kentridge developed the installation Black Box / Chambre Noire, consisting of a mechanized theater in miniature, animated film projections, charcoal drawings, and sculptural elements. Black Box / Chambre Noire engages with the German colonial presence in Africa and the genocide committed against the Hereros.
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July 16 – October 9, 2005
Douglas Gordon’s The VANITY of Allegory
Douglas Gordon is an inveterate storyteller. The fictions that he weaves extend outward from the objects of his art—film, video, sound installations, photographs, and text works—to encompass his own artistic persona. Douglas Gordon’s The VANITY of Allegory, an exhibition conceived specifically for the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, explores the notion of the veiled self-portrait as an art-historical trope, a literary device, and a cinematic strategy, while examining the intersection of vanitas as a meditation on the ephemeral nature of life itself and self-representation as an act of vanity or a ploy to remain immortal.
For Douglas Gordon’s The VANITY of Allegory, the artist turned to the histories of art and film for source material. By combining historical and contemporary art and film, Gordon has created a visual collage that narrates issues of self-representation and double identity.
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April 30 – June 27, 2005
25 – Twenty-five Years of the Deutsche Bank Collection
With the exhibition 25, Deutsche Bank is celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of its corporate collection. Twenty-five international personalities from art and business, all with close ties to the bank, have selected a panorama of works ranging from classical modernism to current positions in contemporary art. The show is complemented by the ”Curator’s Choice.” On display are outstanding artworks by Max Beckmann, Joseph Beuys, Tracey Emin, Max Ernst, Eva Hesse, Wassily Kandinsky, Martin Kippenberger, Paul Klee, August Macke, Piet Mondrian, Gerhard Richter, and Miwa Yanagi, among others, in the spectacular exhibition architecture of the internationally renowned architect Zaha Hadid.
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January 29 – April 10, 2005
No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper
No Limits, Just Edges provides a comprehensive overview of Jackson Pollock’s drawings. A retrospective selection highlighting the most important phases of Pollock’s works on paper begins with his early sketchbook studies based on Old Master paintings as well as those influenced by his contemporaries, mainly the Mexican muralists. Significant consideration in the exhibition will be given to Pollock’s works on paper executed in the decisive decade between 1940 and 1950 which mirror Pollock’s advancements in painting and display the artist’s reading of Surrealist imagery and techniques. The exhibition re-examines the artist’s practice as a draftsman by considering his works on paper.
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October 30, 2004 – January 16, 2005
John Baldessari: Somewhere Between Almost Right and Not Quite (wiith Orange)
Influenced by Marcel Duchamp, the American artist John Baldessari rose to prominence in the late 1960s, combining Pop Arts’s use of imagery from the mass media with Conceptual art’s use of language to create a unique body of work that has become a hallmark of postmodern art. For this commission, Somewhere Between Almost Right and Not Quite (with Orange), Baldessari has created thirteen large-scale works. Using stills from numerous sources, Baldessari paints over crucial information in the images, essentially withholding information. Orange—a color between yellow and red—is dominant in this project. Baldessari revels in juxtapositions: His imagery conveys harmony and discord, security and disruption—and he focuses on the voids left between these extremes, the uncomfortable existence of “betweenness.”
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July 27 – October 17, 2004
Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition: Photographs and Mannerist Prints
Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition explores the classical photography of Robert Mapplethorpe mirrored in the dramatic, yet graceful work of sixteenth-century Dutch and Flemish Mannerist prints by artists such as Hendrick Goltzius, Jan Harmensz. Muller, Jacob Matham, and Jan Saenredam, themselves inspired by classical and Italian art. The exhibition focuses on Mapplethorpe’s relationship to the elaborate forms of Mannerist art, in particular the study of the human form in all its sensuous manifestations.
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April 17 – July 9, 2004
Nam June Paik: Global Groove 2004
Global Groove 2004, Nam June Paik’s celebration of our media art world, will transform the Deutsche Guggenheim galleries into a dynamic space of surfaces and screens filled with moving images. The work, Paik’s first major art installation since his laser projects created for the retrospective The Worlds of Nam June Paik at the Guggenheim Museum, celebrates his return to Berlin. The title is taken from Paik’s legendary videotape Global Groove, 1973, which proclaimed the future of a global artists‘ television. The installation will feature a mix of newly restored video experiments from the 1960s together with his distinctive image processed global television projects from the 1970s through the 1990s celebrating his collaborations with Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Laurie Anderson, and Philip Glass.
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January 31 – March 28, 2004
Miwa Yanagi – Deutsche Bank Collection
Miwa Yanagi achieved a breakthrough in the international art world with her photo series entitled Elevator Girls, whose theme is the consumer culture of Japan. The oeuvre of the artist, who was born in 1967 in Kobe, focuses above all on the roles and images assigned to women in Japan. Miwa Yanagi’s new works in the series My Grandmothers analyze the dreams of the future held by young people. Their personal visions of life in the year 2050 have been transformed into pictures and are accompanied by brief, poetically suggestive texts which arose out of conversations with the protagonists, and which thereby create a further level of expression in addition to the photography.
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October 31, 2003 – January 18, 2004
Bruce Nauman: Theaters of Experience
One of the most significant artists of the second half of the twentieth century, Bruce Nauman has expanded the scope of traditional artistic practice and influenced a generation of artists. He is known for his diverse production, as well as his ongoing investigation of our most basic physical, emotional, and psychological states. Bruce Nauman: Theaters of Experience is a focused selection of works in a range of media, including sculpture, video, holograms, neon, and architectural installations, which examine the artist’s use of performance devices as a conduit for heightened self-awareness.
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July 24 – October 5, 2003
Tom Sachs: Nutsy’s
Nutsy’s is made up of sculptural, mechanical and video elements connected by a roadway running the length and breadth of the installation. Tom Sachs and his team have dreamed up a room-filling creation of incorrigible bricoleur whose elements are culture, consumerism, and irony. Security cameras connected to video monitors survey the scene as visitors move around the racetrack, marveling at remote-controlled model cars zooming past reproductions of Le Corbusier’s architecture, furniture by Mies van der Rohe, and other elements including a McDonald’s restaurant and a DJ station. Tom Sachs’ Nutsy’s entices visitors into this complex and chaotic world in which the idealistic modernism of Le Corbusier coexists with the commercial modernism of McDonald’s—inviting viewers to navigate it for themselves.
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May 10 – July 6, 2003
Richard Artschwager: Up and Down/ Back and Forth
Up and Down / Back and Forth is the title chosen by Richard Artschwager for his current exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim. The artist, who is celebrating his eightieth birthday this year, expanded this exhibition for Berlin with new works. The show combines works from the Deutsche Bank Collection as well as loans from private collections. With Richard Artschwager, Deutsche Bank has chosen one of the most molded American painters and sculptors as its artist of the business year 2003.
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January 18 – April 27, 2003
Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism
Kazimir Malevich is considered one of the pioneering founders of the twentieth-century non-objective art. Between 1915 and 1932, he developed a form of abstract painting known as Suprematism—art of pure form, which was to be understandable to the general public, independent of the viewer’s cultural or ethnic background. Malevich developed an artistic utopia that became the secular counterpart to religious painting—and, in his case, aimed to replace the omnipresent icon in Russia—by creating works intended to transport the viewer into a higher level of consciousness. Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism is the first exhibition devoted exclusively to this decisive moment in the artist’s career.
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October 11, 2002 – January 5, 2003
Gerhard Richter – Eight Gray
Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin will present Gerhard Richter: Eight Gray, a new commission project consisting of eight monumental, mirrored panels. One of the most influential artists of our time, Richter has become known for his manipulation of various pictorial conventions. His diverse production, which includes sculptural objects and paintings and ranges from landscapes to monochromes, is characterized as a whole by the artist’s steadfast investigation of the nature of looking. The commission for the Guggenheim grows out of a series of works Richter first conceived in the mid-1960s. The hazy reflections of the artist’s series of enameled glass panels articulate the viewer’s fleeting relationship to the real.
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July 20 – September 27, 2002
Eduardo Chillida – Antonia Tápies
The stature of Eduardo Chillida and Antoni Tàpies as artists of historical significance transcends the boundaries of their homeland, Spain, while their work remains informed by their national and local identities. Chillida, born in San Sebastian in 1924, uses iron and stone culled from the Basque region to create sculptures of great strength and serenity. Tàpies’s paintings, infused with humble materials such as sand and straw, derive their power from the artist’s experiences of Civil War in Barcelona, where he was born in 1923. The exhibition Eduardo Chillida – Antoni Tàpies was drawn primarily from the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, with significant additions from generous private and public lenders
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May 17 – July 7, 2002
Kara Walker – Deutsche Bank Collection
The works of Kara Walker focus on questions of identity, racism, and social injustice. Her historical figures, at first sight apparently unsophisticated, mostly black silhouettes, subtly yet brutally combine episodes from the history of the American South with images from Walker’s own imagination. The artist also uses drawings and prints to create this ambivalent combination of racist, decorative, and personal images. The exhibition of her works from the Deutsche Bank Collection and other international private collections embraces all media capable of opening up significant new narrative perspectives.
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February 9 – May 5, 2002
Bill Viola – Going Forth by Day
Bill Viola ranks alongside Nam June Paik as one of the most prominent and innovative representatives of Media art. In his installations, Viola focuses on and explores themes of art history as well as critically challenging ideas involving individual artists and theorists. As a commissioned work for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Bill Viola has created Going Forth By Day, a new work that serves to create an epic articulation of the passage of nature’s cycles of birth and regeneration. The installation consists of five video projections: Fire Birth, The Path, The Deluge, The Voyage, and First Light. By utilizing the various possibilities of modern video and computer techniques, Viola evokes onto the walls of the exhibition hall projected image panels that recall a fresco cycle.
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October 27, 2001 – January 13, 2002
Rachel Whiteread: Transient Spaces
Since the late 1980s, the British artist Rachel Whiteread has created a unique body of work consisting predominantly of sculptures cast from discarded household items and abandoned architectural spaces. For her commission project for Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Whiteread examines the themes of public and private as related to the rebuilding of Europe after World War II. Whiteread‘s two casts, taken from an upstairs apartment and a basement staircase, reveal a generic, neutral structure—a space of transience—where the realms of public and private, as well as the spiritual, industrial, and domestic, blur boundaries, reflecting the aesthetic concerns and economic necessities of the postwar period.
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July 7 – October 7, 2001
On the Sublime: Mark Rothko, Yves Klein, James Turrell
By highlighting the work of Mark Rothko, Yves Klein, and James Turrell, this exhibition will examine three different strategies used by twentieth-century artists to address the issue of the sublime in visual art. The sublime is an experience of something so boundless, grand, or dangerous that it inspires awe, fear, or veneration. Rather than using the representational models of nineteenth-century Romantic painters, Rothko, Klein, and Turrell create sublime experiences for the viewer through seemingly simple combinations of abstracted color, light, and space.
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April 21 – June 17, 2001
Neo Rauch – Deutsche Bank Collection
A vivid visual language and intensity of color are the hallmarks of Neo Rauch’s works, initially suggesting a proximity to commercial graphic art of the 1950s. Equally apparent are echoes of pop art found in the playful use of the trivial and “trashier” elements borrowed from the world of movies and comics. Perhaps what makes Neo Rauch’s pictures so striking is the fact that they appear to be familiar yet at the same time surprisingly new. The realistic elements, for example, seem very tangible, yet refuse to succumb to any singleness of meaning once combined.
The exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin combines works from the Deutsche Bank Collection with new drawings by the artist.
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February 3 – April 8, 2001
The Sultan’s Signature: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Sabancı University, Istanbul
Calligraphy is the most highly esteemed and the most universal of all Islamic art forms. In no other time or place did the art of Islamic calligraphy rise to the heights it reached in the Ottoman period in Istanbul. The seventy-one richly illuminated manuscripts and handsome calligraphic compositions, which represent the work of nearly every outstanding Turkish calligrapher from the second half of the fifteenth century through the early twentieth century, are drawn from the important collection of the Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Sabancı University, Istanbul.
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October 27, 2000 – January 27, 2001
Jeff Koons – Easyfun-Ethereal
The Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin presents new paintings, entitled Easyfun - Ethereal, by the American artist Jeff Koons. Koon's work evolved from Easyfun, his recent series of mirror images. The oil pictures of this group show tourist attractions, children’s toys, cornflakes, and other aspects of popular culture. He uses extracts of reproductions from the media and combines familiar but unrelated images, the more collage-like paintings in photorealistic perfection. For the commissioned work of the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Koons combines the iconography of advertising with the technique of poster painting and seems to escape any socially critical approach.
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July 15 – October 8, 2000
Lawrence Weiner – NACH ALLES / AFTER ALL
A pioneer of Conceptual Art, American artist Lawrence Weiner creates sculptures whose medium is language. Since 1968, when he concluded that the actual physical construction of a work was not critical to its existence in the world, he has created hundreds of artworks using language as the constant in an array of possible other materials. While not site-specific, Weiner’s text pieces physically correspond to the locations in which they are exhibited. Art and architecture are thereby seamlessly connected. For his Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin commission entitled NACH ALLES / AFTER ALL, Weiner has created a bilingual installation, in which the written word traverses the gallery walls, articulating the space with associative phrases.
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May 27 – June 25, 2000
Förg – Deutsche Bank Collection
Günther Förg (1952–2ß13) is one of the most important contemporary German artists. His goal of turning color, surface, and space into ever new varieties of the expressively experiencable is a continuous line running through his work in all types of media, from murals and paintings through chalk drawings and watercolors to photographs and prints. Günther Förg has combined new monumental paintings with drawings for his exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin. Arranged in close cooperation with the artist, the exhibition also comprises works from the Deutsche Bank Collection which Günther Förg has produced in various media.
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March 15 – May 14, 2000
Hiroshi Sugimoto – Portraits
Hiroshi Sugimoto occupies an exceptional position in the world of photography, combining poetic imagination and noble elegance with conceptual complexity. Work groups that deal with topics such as dioramas, cinemas or ocean views determine his photographic oeuvre. As a commissioned work for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Sugimoto photographed in the famous wax figurine cabinets in London, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. With large-format portraits of historical figures in the style of classical paintings, the artist interrogates image and reality. A highlight of the exhibition is the multipart photo tableau of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper.
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November 6, 1999 – February 13, 2000
Dan Flavin: The Architecture of Light
At the forefront of a generation of artists working with new materials in the 1960s, Dan Flavin (1933–1996) was recognized for his pioneering use of light and color divorced from traditional artistic contexts. Employing only commercial fluorescent lights, Flavin devised a radical new art form that circumvented the limits imposed by frames, pedestals, and other conventional means of display. Dan Flavin: The Architecture of Light presents works from the comprehensive Flavin collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. It begins with his earliest single-fixture compositions, and highlights seminal pieces from a twenty-five year period that underscore the transformative effects of luminous color on the architectural environment.
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July 10 – October 17, 1999
Amazons of the Avant-Garde: Exter, Goncharova, Popova, Rosanova, Stepanova, Udalzova
While the remarkable aesthetic achievements of the early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde have been well documented in recent years, one essential component still remains to be recognized: the unprecedented number of women artists actively involved in the movement. Amazons of the Avant-Garde will exhibit the paintings of Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, and Nadezhda Udaltsova. Each developed an original, independent style that broke new ground in the fine and applied arts. The exhibition will trace the evolution of modern Russian art from Neo-Primitivism, Cubo-Futurism, and Rayism to Suprematism and Constructivism.
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May 29 – June 6, 1999
Georg Baselitz: Nostalgia in Istanbul
The Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin presents Nostalgia in Istanbul, a new series of works by Georg Baselitz. These large-scale paintings, a continuation of the series displayed at the Reichstag, reflect motifs of Slavic folk art and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, both of which were inspirations to Baselitz. The exhibition is complimented by works from the Deutsche Bank collection, providing an additional dialog between the new works and specially selected watercolors and drawings, some on view to audiences for the first time. The sculpture Ding mit Asien will be on exhibit as well, completing the full range of the artist’s contemporary oeuvre.
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February 20 – May 2, 1999
Andreas Slominski
Andreas Slominski, born in Meppen in 1959, is one of the most respected German artists of his generation. He works with functional objects and performative gestures, often imbuing the incidental and the commonplace with deeper shades of meaning. His multi-component installation for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin—including a giant bird trap, a cough syrup transport system, and a bicycle pump—embodies the various themes in his practice and provides a carefully choreographed, condensed overview of his career to date.
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October 15, 1998 – January 31, 1999
"After Mountains and Sea": Helen Frankenthaler 1956–1959
The exhibition focuses on the early work of Helen Frankenthaler, initiated by the legendary painting Mountains and Sea. In this first museum exhibition of the artist in Germany, fourteen key works will be shown, with which Frankenthaler achieved a breakthrough effect. Born in New York in 1928, Frankenthaler began her artistic career at a time when Abstract Expressionism was at its peak. Her first works are characterized by great beauty, substance, and energy. With the innovative use of materials and the combination of the surface and media, she opened a wide range of possibilities for painting.
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September 19 – Oktober 4, 1998
Katharina Sieverding: Works on Pigment
Katharina Sieverding, who lives in Düsseldorf, is one of the most important contemporary artists. With her large photographs investigating topics such as identity, individual and society, the technology of people and nature, she represents the view of socially responsible art. In 1997, Deutsche Bank selected her as “artist in the financial year” and organized numerous exhibitions with her works from the collection. The exhibition Works on Pigment at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin will mark the festive end of the tour. This is the first time that series of works from Deutsche Bank’s collection will be shown at this location: Life Death (1969/95), Night Man (1982), and Transformer (1973).
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June 30 – September 6, 1998
From Dürer to Rauschenberg: A Quintessence of Drawing. Masterworks from the Albertina and the Guggenheim
Drawings spanning five centuries— from Dürer to Rauschenberg—are on view at Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin. The Albertina Collection in Vienna and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York are opening their archives for this exhibition. Eighteen world-famous artists—among them Albrecht Dürer, Raphael, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso, Joseph Beuys, and Robert Rauschenberg—represented each with five drawings document the historical development and structural evolution of the drawing, as an art medium, over the last five centuries. Its importance as a means of documentation and observation and its function as a vehicle for invention and experiment will be addressed as well.
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March 7 – June 14, 1998
James Rosenquist: The Swimmer in the Econo-mist
Twice a year, the Deutsche Guggenheim grants carte blanche to an artist, giving him or her free rein to create a space- or site-specific work for the exhibition hall on Unter den Linden. The new series of commissioned works opens with the three-part, large-format oil tableau The Swimmer in the Econo-mist by the American Pop Art artist James Rosenquist. On a canvas almost 48 meters long, it thematizes the art and wars of the twentieth century, the increasing digital shift, and the tremendous pace of economic and political upheaval at the beginning of the millennium.
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November 7, 1997 – February 15, 1998
Visions of Paris: Robert Delaunay’s Series
The exhibition is dedicated to the paintings of Robert Delaunay. They show Saint Séverin, the Eiffel Tower, and Paris from the perspective of the artist. Visions of Paris: Robert Delaunay’s Series is particularly of interest because of Delaunay’s relationship with Germany, especially Berlin. His early works met with greater enthusiasm in Germany than in his home country, France, and had a strong influence on the German expressionists, including Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and August Macke, who were part of the Blaue Reiter group. Delaunay’s paintings are among the artist’s greatest works. With them, he made an important contribution to the development of the new understanding of art in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century.