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Gregor Schneider
Gregor Schneider is a sculptor of rooms. His art is not
what we see but the space that contains us. Text Francesco Bonami.
Gregor Schneider is a sculptor of rooms. His art is not
what we see but the space that contains us. Recently he
wanted to recreate a room from the Museum Haus Lange in
Krefeld designed by Mies van der Rohe to be a private living
room and use it to display a terminally ill person who chose to
die in that room. In Hamburg he showed Cube Hamburg 2007:
a 1:1 replica of the Kaaba, the shrine that holds the Black
Stone at the Great Mosque in Mecca. The Kaaba is in fact
an inside out monumental room for spirituality. Schneider’s
masterpiece is Totes House u r, in the small German town of
Rheydt, basically a suburban temple to claustrophobia and
anguish. Schneider’s obsession with private and inner space
verges on mental insanity. His home could remind visitors of
a terrorist hide-out, like the infamous Red Brigades’ prison
where the Italian terrorist group kept the Christian Democrat
leader Aldo Moro for 55 days in 1978 before murdering him.
But in a more creepy way Schneider plays with our dysfunctional
society and its invisible psychopathy.
The images of the windowless basement cell where
Wolfgang Priklopil held young Austrian woman Natascha
Kampusch captive for eight years from 1998 to 2006 bear
a disturbing similarity with Gregor Schneider’s sculptural
spaces. Underlying Schneider’s language and grammar is
each human being’s fear of losing his or her freedom. The
German artist is not addressing physical freedom but our
freedom to experience our life in its wholeness, the freedom
to choose where to live and where to die, but ultimately the
freedom to escape the judgment of social preconceptions,
limitations and censorship.
