Leni Hoffmann
RGB
26 September 2009 – 28 March 2010
Heinrich-Böll-Platz
50667 Köln
fon +49-(0) 221-221 24483
fax +49-(0) 221-221 24114
The Düsseldorf-based artist Leni Hoffmann has created a site-specific ex-hibition that dialogues with the architecture and the collection of Cologne’s Ludwig Museum in a refreshing new manner. This radical show fundamentally challenges the collection-based institution through ephemeral on and off-site projects that evolve over time and question the autonomy of art.
Few movements have influenced the course of modern and contemporary art as deeply as Suprematism and Constructivism. Like her predecessors El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko, Leni Hoffmann (born 1962) in turn questions the autonomy of art and in particular painting through site specific, “user-friendly” installations that, like Proun, extend painting into architectural space and everyday life. Hoffmann’s exhibi-tion renders homage to the Museum Ludwig’s exceptional collection of Russian Avantgarde art, which is currently highlighted in a separate six-part exhibition series.
Both this project series and the Hoffmann exhibition are curated by Katia Baudin, Deputy Director of the Ludwig Museum.
In accordance with her “nomadic” approach, Leni Hoffmann has selected five very different and totally unexpected locations for her work that underscore architectural discrepancies or particularities of the museum inaugurated in 1986 and designed by the Cologne-based Architects Busmann & Haberer. A visit through the exhibition is simultaneously a visit through the entire museum, a treasure hunt that takes the visi-tor from the entrance hall to the roof terrace, while encountering works in a hallway and in a permanent collection room. These colorful, geometrical paintings that extend vertically and horizontally into space – from windows and walls to the floor and the ceiling – unite two materials of contradictory nature, durable concrete and malleable plasticine. The viewer is invited to become a transitory part of many of these installa-tions, by leaving his footprints on the clay and sitting on the cushion-covered con-crete extensions.
The exhibition reaches directly beyond museum walls, with a temporary outdoor seat-ing sculpture in the midst of a major construction site neighboring the museum, which encourages the spectator/user to enter into a new dialogue with this transitional envi-ronment.
The most radical work of the exhibition is still to come: “pizzicato”, in which she will create on an unannounced day, a unique work for Cologne’s leading local newspa-per, the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, directly inspired by the offset printing process. This work – which will last one day –, will enable everyone who purchases the newspaper that day to own a unique work of art, as no two editions will be exactly the same.
A catalogue/artist’s book will be published at the end of 2009 at DuMont Verlag.
At the same time in Museum Ludwig:
Angelika Hoerle. Comet of the Cologne Avant-Garde
In 1967, Angie Littlefield, the curator of this exhibition, and grand-niece of the artist siblings, found this precious time capsule of the Cologne arts scene 1919-1923 in Fick’s garden shed in Cologne Vogelsang. The oeuvre of Angelika Hoerle reveals an intensely personal story filled with pathos and humour. It explores artistic, political and social changes in the early days of the Weimar Republic. Most significantly, it opens an interesting new window on Cologne’s art history from the perspective of a young, politically engaged, female artist.
