FFF4 | Invisible City
Gregor Schneider
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Introduction
Who other than the controversial German artist and sculptor, Gregor Schneider, a pre-eminent exponent of the new conceptual art and winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, could make Omonoia Square disappear? Shifting its centre, the very navel of Athens, art and metaphysics meet.
Photo: Stavros Petropoulos
In fact, Schneider's entire oeuvre seeks to balance the visible and the invisible as he explores the relationship between private and public space, the imaginary and the real. The poetics of architecture, the many faces of the cityscape, are summarized in his work in the simple statement that "cities could be different if we could design and build them differently". He also references cities which offer a safe haven to the imagination in this era of perturbing transparency and the networked documentation of reality, a safe place where the concepts of surveillance, control, visibility and recognition seem to lose their dominance, albeit only for a time and in his work.
The use to which he puts camouflage in his Athenian action is bound up with the historic square's invisibility from above. The artist was inspired by the famous camouflaged locations of World War II like the aircraft factories on America's West Coast which were covered by gigantic sacks for the duration of the war for fear of Japanese bombing raids. His is a practice which, by protecting and camouflaging, distorts the image of the actual urban environment, meaning the appearance and reception of reality.
FFF4 | Invisible City Gallery
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Photo: Stavros Petropoulos
One of Schneider's most important projects is "Haus u r", which he started in 1985. In it, he has transformed his family home by creating copies of rooms within the original rooms of his home with their floors, walls, ceiling and doors. The hidden gaps between the actual rooms and their copies become mysterious, hollow places. Although visitors of the house report about claustrophobic experience in the disturbing normality, Schneider himself avoids interpretation, emphasizing instead the concepts of addition and the inessential or unnecessary. He said once: "I do not know whether the house is a refuge or dungeon".
Other projects have provided much attention and social relevant discussions, such as his twin houses "Die Familie Schneider" (2004), the project "Cube" (2005), the "High Security Isolation Cells" (2005), his "Dying Room" (2007), his "Temple in Kolkata" (2011) or the pulverized Nazi Goebbels birthplace (2014).
In Athens, Schneider goes back to the high-political public space. What is today a public space and what a private space? He presented "21 Beach Cells" in 2007 on popular Bondi beach in Sydney, Australia. For "21 Beach Cells", Schneider placed 21 wire cells on the beach containing sun loungers and umbrellas, thereby combining relaxation and recreation with restriction and incarceration in a highly irritating way. He asked: "What kind of space does a person needs to feel free?"Credits
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