My Summer Vacation, part 1

I've been living the bachelor's life for the past couple of weeks.  My German half is in Germany for another few weeks toiling away on her MFA.  But at the beginning of July, we spent 12 glorious days together in the motherland.

A view into the photo gallery of the Museum Industriekultur.

We arrived in Nuernberg within an hour of each other on separate flight.  We immediately scooted over to the Museum of Industrie Kulture to deliver a couple of A's photographs for her two person exhibit with Beatrice Haverich which was to open the next day.   

 

Beatrice's photographs of public swimming pools.

  

This show is a homecoming of sorts for both A and Beatrice.

For A, it's the first time she's shown her work in Nuernberg and this work owes much to her upbringing in the home of Albrecht Durer.   Angelika cut up a few prints from her Felsenfest and Selensuche series into postcard sized pieces, then on daily basis she mailed these postcards to her parents.   Three of the works were ultimately treated in this manner.Originally conceived as a way to mitigate the cost of shipping the work to Germany, it had the secondary encapsulating various possible themes of the exhibit.  Angelika's collaborator, her mother, reassembled the works by stitching them together.

 

 

 

 These groups of photographs are almost fetishized by some for their classical mastery and beauty and perhaps their familiarity. The of slicing and mailing thes works undercut the preciousness of the photographs.  They are afterall really a form of conveyance for the concepts behind them.  This physical interference of the image marks the close of this stage of her work while signalling possible future directions,  I think it would have been nice if the post office was more creative in it's role in the collaboration and lost or truly mutilated some of the cards.

After the opening we spent a couple of days hanging out in Nuernberg, visiting friends, going out.  I picked up a handful of great exhibition catologues at the Kunsthalle for 3 Euro each. I made a solo visit to the Neues Museum and caught an entertaining, comic/tragic exhibit by Wiebke Siem.  Katharina Grosse, whose name suddenly seemed to be appearing everywhere in Germany had an indoor and outdoor exhibition of works.

 

Katherina Gross' work at the Neues Museum.

 

Her work is impressive in scale, ambition and flash, but in this instance it's just feels typical in a "meh.  It's pretty I guess" kind of way Typically irreverent, typically unmonumental, typically oversized.  Maybe that's a good thing, however I felt I could spend more time contemplating the relationship between the museum facade and series of cocktail tables arrayed on the same plaze in anticipation of an event later that evening.