21 October 2007 - 20 January 2008

Palermo

»Palermo, the name had been found and slowly it came to stand for the hand belonging to the greatest painter of this generation ...«, wrote Georg Jappe in 1977, shortly after Peter Heisterkamp, who artist's pseudonym was Palermo, died unexpectedly at the age of 33. The Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen will celebrate their 40th anniversary in their home on the Grabbeplatz with an exhibition of his works specifically conceived to accommodate the spatial properties of the building itself. In conjunction with this celebration, which has been designed to render visible both the architecture as well as the institutions themselves, for which it was originally built, a comprehensive overview of Palermo's (1943-1977) work is to be shown for the first time in the town that was at the centre of his life for so many years.
   

21 July - 30 September 2007

CAPITAL GLAMOUR

Andreas Fogarasi, Bernhard Kahrmann, David Maljkovic, Pernille Kapper Williams

The group show »Capital Glamour« circles around the wholesale aesthetisization of the worlds we inhabit and their collective ambivalences. On the one hand it is about the transformation of entire cities into all embracing vehicles for advertising and on the other, the artistic engagement with such glamour-filled concepts, which are posited neither on an affirmative appreciation nor a simple critique of commodity aesthetics. The frequently conceptual character of the works distils for its part more the visual potential of these applied aesthetics taken from advertising and marketing strategies, rendering them accessible on the abstract level of replacement.
   

5 May – 8 July 2007

GERARD BYRNE

The photographic and filmic works of the Irish artist Gerard Byrne refer back to texts and images, in which social sensitivities and concerns are dealt with in a subtle manner.
The spectrum ranges from a conversation with Jean Paul Sartre to interviews in various lifestyle magazines from the 1960s and 1970s dramatically re-enacted by Byrne. The fact that, in retrospect, often very little remain of past visions, even though they still always seem to retain a certain actuality, runs throughout his work like a basic motif.
   

15 - 25 April 2007

STÄDTISCHE BÜHNE

Markus Ambach, Jana Debus, Angela Fette, Christiane Fochtmann, Daniela Georgieva, Marcus Herse, Christian Jendreiko, Henry Latz, André Niebur, Anne Pöhlmann, Jan Wagner, Jochen Weber, Jost Wischnewski

For ten days the Kunstverein presents short term exhibitions, film screenings and performances. During this time Kunstverein functions as a „stage" for experimental formats and presentations. The program divides into (almost daily) evening events as well as „setting days" on which Kunstverein is open during the day.

Supported by Kunst- und Kulturstiftung der Stadtsparkasse Düsseldorf.

   

3 February – 9 April 2007

WORDS AND THINGS

Alexander Gutke, Annette Kelm, Susanne Kriemann, Matthias Meyer, Christopher Williams

Words and things have a somewhat arbitrary relationship to one another. Any thinking about the constitution of language incorporates therefore thinking about the cognition of reality, images and things. How do language and systems of categorization determine reality and the portrayal of reality? Is our perception governed by what we think we know? In his book The Order of Things, the original title of which translating as »Words and Things«, the French philosopher Michel Foucault investigates different historical systems of classification with regard to ways in which the »world« is apprehended.
The group exhibition »Words and Things« features a series of photographs and films by international artists, who, in the broadest sense possible, engage in with questions of representation and show how aesthetic and cultural meaning often emanates primarily from the interpretation of images.