Room with No Escape:
Gregor Schneider's Photo
Series Haus ur
Among some of the most recent
acquisitions to the Deutsche Bank Collection is Gregor Schneider's photo
series Haus ur. With its soundproof chambers, doubled rooms, and
hybrid spaces, the artist plunges the viewer into claustrophobic
confusion, proving himself to be a poet of the ominous. Oliver Koerner
von Gustorf introduces Gregor Schneider's hermetic constructions.
Gregor
Schneiders Haus ur in Rheydt, 1985-1999, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006
"You can kill a person with an apartment
just as well as with an axe," as Heinrich
Zille once said. The artist and photographer from Berlin was certainly
referring to the miserable living conditions in the rear courtyards of the
Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic. But his statement could also be
understood metaphorically, if you think of the compartmentalized,
claustrophobic spaces that Gregor
Schneider constructs - such as his Haus
ur, which he has been working on since 1985 in Rheydt, a town
incorporated into Mönchengladbach,
North Rhine-Westphalia.
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Puff aus Berlin, Haus ur Rheydt,
1996, Deutsche Bank Collection, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006
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He was sixteen years old in the mid-eighties when he took
over his father's one-family house next door to the parents' lead foundry
- and the turn-of-the-century building a perfect example of a typically
German, nondescript architecture. The abbreviation "ur" derives from the
address in Unterheydener Straße, but in German, its initials could just as
easily stand for "altered" or "invisible room" - Schneider leaves this
open. Since that time, the artist has obsessively built and rebuilt his
opus magnum with inaccessible rooms and dead ends; he's sawn it in parts,
sold them to collectors, and opened a replica to visitors at the Venice
Biennial in 2001. The "House," with all its clones, motifs, and
copies, becomes for Schneider a silent chamber, a secluded stage on which
the fears and phobias of its inhabitants become manifest.
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LIEBESLAUBE HAUS ur, RHEYDT, 1996,
Deutsche Bank Collection, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006
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In the volume accompanying the art project Die
Familie Schneider, the British journalist and writer Andrew
O'Hagan wrote: "Gregor Schneider is a poet of the ominous. His work
gives a new meaning to the term 'life threatening.' When people use that
phrase they usually mean that something poses danger to life, but
Schneider uses it differently, for his work suggests that life itself is a
threat, an ominous activity, and that living is a desperate act of
repetition where one breath must follow another in a seemingly involuntary
drama of survival."
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IM KERN HAUS ur, RHEYDT, 1996,
Deutsche Bank Collection, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006
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With this work from 2004, Gregor Schneider created one of
the most profoundly disturbing installations in contemporary art. The site
of his work consisted of two entirely unremarkable adjacent brick houses
in London's East End. The inner life behind the drawn curtains at No. 14
and No. 16, however, was identical down to the very last detail: the
rooms, the worn furniture, the brown rug, the cracks in the walls, the
yellow light, and even the used towels in the bathrooms.
IM
KERN HAUS ur, RHEYDT, 1996,
Deutsche
Bank Collection, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2006
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