Heimo Zobernig: Piet Mondrian: A Spatial Appropriation / Demonstration Rooms

Avant-garde spatial designs by Piet Mondrian and El Lissitzky that were developed for Dresden in 1926 are the starting point for two exhibitions with newly commissioned works by contemporary artists in the Albertinum that will be presented parallel to the museum’s exhibition Visionary Spaces. Kandinsky, Mondrian, Lissitzky and the Abstract-Constructivist Avant-Garde in Dresden 1919–1932. The historical designs are the intellectual framework for a confrontation with different categories of space as geometric form and as a social place.

Heimo Zobernig. Piet Mondrian: A Spatial Appropriation
For the atrium of the Albertinum, Heimo Zobernig has developed a walk-in spatial installation composed of colored surfaces. Its design harkens back to three 1926 sketches by Piet Mondrian, who drew them for a room in the villa of the Dresden art collector Ida Bienert, which is presented as part of the exhibition Visionary Spaces at the Albertinum. For the walls of the room, Mondrian foresaw a grid that should be painted with yellow, blue, red and grey color fields. Zobernig transfers this foundational design principle of Mondrian into a walk-in cube that corresponds to the original dimensions of the room and is composed of a construction of nested wooden panels. At the same time, Zobernig repeats the design of the inner space on its surfaces and makes Mondrian’s unexecuted design now able to be experienced spatially and sculpturally. Heimo Zobernig’s work since the mid-1980s has repeatedly dealt with the design of spaces and the presentation of art, such as in the context of his spatial installation for the Austrian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. He published a color theory and dealt in detail with geometric abstraction like that of Piet Mondrian.

In a painting series begun in 2000, Zobernig examines the grid as the guiding artistic form since modernity with materials like acrylic paint and tape. A selection of earlier paintings from this series will be exhibited to accompany his installation in the Albertinum. 

Demonstration Rooms: Interventions by Céline Condorelli, Kapwani Kiwanga, Judy Radul
The artists Céline Condorelli, Kapwani Kiwanga, and Judy Radul were invited, within the framework of the project Demonstration Rooms, to develop artistic interventions in the collection presentation of the Albertinum. In different spaces of the museum, they show site-specific works that direct the focus to those elements of the exhibition that otherwise would be easily overlooked: benches, light, plinths, and the transparent walls of the Albertinum’s special viewing depot. The new commissions reflect the display of art as well as habits of seeing and of spatial perception. In doing so, they take up the ideas of El Lissitzky, who used the term “demonstration rooms” for his works, such as the Room for Abstract Art, which had originally been created as an exhibition space for the Internationale Kunstausstellung Dresden in 1926 and can now be seen as a reconstruction in the exhibition Visionary Spaces. With his unconventional spatial design, he aimed to activate art spectatorship.

The publication A Glossary of Display will present the results of a one-day symposium to take place in spring 2019.

The Albertinum is the Dresden State Art Collections’ museum of modern and contemporary art and holds one of the largest collections of paintings and sculpture from the early nineteenth century to the present in Germany.

Related program

Around the Table to the Door
March 30, 12–12:30pm
Dance performance by the Palucca University of Dance Dresden, based on Mondrian’s spatial designs 

Sitting in the museum. Céline Condorelli
April 5, 1–1:30pm 

Exploring Mondrian Compositions in Three-dimensional Space
April 14, 6:30–8pm
Talk & VR-Presentation by Johannes Zanker, Professor of Neuroscience at Royal Holloway University London 
 

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