Gregor Schneider

MOCA presents Dead House ur by German artist Gregor Schneider (b. 1969), an installation featuring an obsessively altered version of the interior of Schneider’s childhood house in Rheydt, Germany. Gregor Schneider: Dead House ur opens October 12, 2003 at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) at The Geffen Contemporary (152 North Central Avenue in Downtown L.A.) and remains on view through September 13, 2004.

From the age of 16, Gregor Schneider has been dismantling and reassembling the interior of his childhood home. Layering walls upon walls, adding dead-end corridors and secret passageways, living within his work and constantly revising it, Schneider has created a haunting depiction of domestic memory. His duplicated rooms both resemble and conceal the original spaces, and so many changes have been made that Schneider can no longer reconstruct the house's original layout.

Organized by MOCA Chief Curator Paul Schimmel, MOCA’s presentation will be the first time the work will be presented in its entirety in the United States. The work has been presented in its entirety only once before at the 2001 Venice Biennale where it won the Golden Lion award for the Best National Pavilion.

"Dead Haus ur is a highly evocative, emotionally charged, and psychologically revealing architectural installation which both responds to and elaborates on the childhood home of the artist and his family,” said Schimmel. “Simultaneously, Dead Haus ur extends the traditions of European installation and performance-based art in the 20th century with artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Beuys." Schneider's interventions in the family home in Rheydt are, on the surface, hardly noticeable. Visitors may enter a succession of rooms without perceiving anything more than their interiors and light behind curtains. Neon tubes light windows with views of windowless walls in inaccessible rooms beyond. Some rooms rotate on their axes, emphasizing Schneider’s illusions of space and home. Altering his interiors in such a way to prevent the original shape of the room from being recognizable, he provides a new perspective on the complex interaction between space and the viewer. While individual rooms have been shown in museums worldwide, the entire structure has been transported to MOCA where the artist has reassembled it to form a powerful and haunting environment within The Geffen Contemporary. That Schneider continues to live and work in the original Rheydt house only enhances the unsettling intimacy with which this peculiar artwork mixes aesthetics and everyday life.

“Schneider’s work is deeply personal and its autobiographical content powerful,” said MOCA Director Jeremy Strick. “The remarkable transformation of The Geffen Contemporary is a testament to the adaptability of that building to the most ambitious artists’ projects.” Presented as a sculptural environment, Schneider’s work reveals various layers of construction and an elaborate process involved in recreating an entire home. The claustrophobic work is accessible only to a few visitors at a time. Visitors will enter through a new separate entrance from the outside of the Geffen building along Temple Street.

About the Artist Born in Rheydt, Germany, in 1969, Schneider is a graduate of the Düsseldorf, Münster, and Hamburg academies of art and has shown various room configurations of Dead Haus ur throughout Europe since 1989. Part of a new generation of German artists in their 30s who explore the merging of design, sculpture, and residential architecture, Schneider also follows an impressive national lineage that includes Joseph Beuys, Gunther Uecker, and Hans Haacke, who have all previously shown at the Venice Biennale. The artist has presented his work at the Tate Gallery (1998), the 53rd Carnegie International (1999), and The Saint Louis Art Museum, in addition to galleries in Mönchengladbach, Düsseldorf, Paris, Berlin, Cologne, Tokyo, Amsterdam, London, Warsaw, and Milan. His work as the German representative at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001) was awarded the Best National Pavilion prize. Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, 250-page catalogue. Published by Liverani of Italy in cooperation with MOCA and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, the book will feature an essay by Paul Schimmel, interviews with the artist, and photographs of the MOCA installation. Pressetext

Gregor Schneider - Dead House ur