GROUP EXHIBITION

Galerie Max Hetzler is delighted to honour the composer Walter Zimmermann with an exhibition and concert programme at Goethestraße 2/3, from 30 August to 1 September, to mark his 75th birthday: BEGINNER’S MIND.

Born in 1949 in Schwabach, Franconia, Walter Zimmermann has been one of the defining figures of the international contemporary music scene since the 1970s. In a deliberate departure from a strictly abstract, music-immanent compositional approach, he adapts concrete material in the form of language, folk music, literature and art, in order to transform these into intricate soundscapes.

Around the same time, the pursuit of a ‘re-figuration’ also played a decisive role for visual artists who opposed the dominant offshoots of Minimal Art and Conceptual Art. In Galerie Max Hetzler’s history, these include Georg Herold, Martin Kippenberger, Inge Mahn, Meuser and Albert Oehlen, who launched this fundamental artistic reorientation into the present.

It was during the gallery’s years in Cologne, starting from 1983, that Zimmermann also lived in the city. Here, he was active not only as a composer, but also through his ‘Beginner Studio’, where in the years 1977 to 1984 he organised numerous concerts and performances with Rüdiger Carl, Sven-Åke Johansson, Morton Feldman and Pauline Oliveros, among others. Zimmermann also emerged as an author and editor, writing Desert Plants: Conversations with 23 American Musicians (1976/2020), Morton Feldman Essays (1985), John Cage: Empty Mind (2012), and Ludwig Wittgenstein: Betrachtungen zur Musik (2022).

Zimmermann’s Fränkische Tänze for string quartet (1977) was already performed by the Sonar Quartet at André Butzer’s exhibition Rohe Milch (6 November 2021–29 January 2022). Building on this, the Berliner Ensemble Adapter will now play selected chamber music pieces from the early 1980s as part of BEGINNER’S MIND.1 In commemoration of his lifetime of composing, Zimmermann will complement this musical selection with his composition Maikäfer flieg! (2023), named after a cycle of paintings by Butzer and dedicated to the painter.

For André Butzer, Walter Zimmermann’s music is a constant source of inspiration–most notably his pioneering Local Music (1977–1981), in which the topoi of landscape, geography and homeland enter into an intensive connection with his musical composition. In honour of the composer’s 75th birthday, Butzer has therefore invited eight further artists who respond to Walter Zimmermann, bringing his music into their own present.

1 The concerts by Ensemble Adapter are supported by the field notes programme of inm | initiative neue musik berlin and are part of the Berlin Month of Contemporary Music (28 August – 30 September 2024) as well as the 2024 performance programme on the occasion of Walter Zimmermann’s 75th birthday in Annenwalde, Berlin, Schwabach et al.