GROUP EXHIBITION

Thomas Ruff’s series ‘l.m.v.d.r.’ (since 1999) offers extensive, detailed insights into Mies van der Rohe’s buildings, furniture design, and the dawn of modernism. It finds Ruff focusing on all the buildings Mies van der Rohe created up until his emigration in 1938, including the Barcelona Pavilion and Villa Tugendhat, as well as Haus Esters and Haus Lange. For the works, Ruff worked with various photographic techniques. Unable to photograph some of the buildings himself, the artist used found, archival images that he subsequently digitally altered.

In his painting Portrait (Studie Mies van der Rohe) (2021), Thomas Scheibitz draws a direct reference to an image of the architect himself: ‘The portrait study shows a mental fragment that is tectonic in nature and could represent a building, a piece of furniture, or a sculpture.’

HOUSE METAATEM (2021) by John Bock consists of a found, white-plaster city model traversed by an orange stripe of spray paint. Hovering above it is a black flat surface divided into two parts, a square, embedded in structures of plaster, plexiglass, aluminium, and vertically-placed Q-tips supporting the architecture that is reminiscent of Neue Nationalgalerie.

References to modernist architecture and design are a frequent feature of Thea Djordjadze’s work—like her wall piece Untitled (2018), a blue-inked glass sculpture that borrows its form and material from a window. Djordjadze painted part of Neue Nationalgalerie’s glazed façade panels for the group exhibition When Things Cast No Shadow (2008); her intuitively applied material and brushwork stood in contrast to the rigid steel skeleton of the building.

Reinhard Mucha’s sculptural video installation Versuchsanordnung II zu Ohne Titel (Reinhard Mucha – Die Letzten werden die Letzten sein – Nationalgalerie Berlin 1982), Für Mies van der Rohe, [2013] (2008) refers to an earlier exhibition setting involving his 1982 work Die Letzten werden die Letzten sein, which was on view at Neue Nationalgalerie that same year and was made up of the museum’s own furnishings. The chairs, display cases, glass tables, and ladders used for it were returned to their original places as soon as the exhibition closed. In the work on view, images of Die Letzten werden die Letzten sein and Mies van der Rohe’s building are shown in a continuous, cross-faded loop on two stacked monitors.

Concurrent with Mies in Mind, Sprüth Magers is showing an online exhibition of Otto Piene’s work with a particular focus on his Sky Art projects—his blow-up sculptures, so-called ‘inflatables.’ One such project also featured in More Sky, Piene’s 2014 solo exhibition at Neue Nationalgalerie: Apart from light and sound works inside the building, the artist also had inflatables floating above the museum.