Johnen

Karin Sander

03 Jun - 08 Jul 2016

KARIN SANDER
3 June - 8 July 2016

Esther Schipper is pleased to present Karin Sander’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. To mark the closing of Johnen Galerie’s Marienstraße space, Karin Sander will present a new work celebrating the gallery’s exhibition history, and she will revisit her own 1991 work, Floor. Karin Sander’s exhibition opens June 3 and runs through July 8, 2016.

Karin Sander’s sculptural intervention Floor was first executed in New York, in 1991. At the time, Gregory Volk wrote: “A new floor has been installed upon the gallery’s own floor and slightly elevated (...) The floor piece is a subtle disruption within the gallery. Quite close to the ground, it seems to float. It simultaneously invites the observer to walk upon it just like any other floor, while making the observer cautious.” Invited to reconsider their habitual expectations of a gallery visit, viewers will become sculptures themselves, walking on a giant plinth.

Documenting the thirty-two year history of Johnen Galerie, Sander has culled about 250 images from the gallery archive, each representing one past exhibition. Presented in ready-made stands, the set of images (13 x 18 cm) represents a record of all the gallery exhibitions, of all the artists, as well as the photographers who documented the exhibitions—and in some cases both.

Analogously to Sander’s first exhibition at Esther Schipper’s gallery space in 2012, which consisted of custom-made carpeting mirroring one room’s floor plan and the tipping-over of then freshly- restructured drywall elements throughout the other rooms, both works on display can be understood as analytical interventions in the gallery’s history.

Another parallel could be drawn to Sander’s 2011 Kernbohrungen (Core Drilling) conceived on occasion of her solo exhibition at the N.B.K. in Berlin: for the duration of her exhibition, the Kunstverein’s office paper trash was dropped directly through five holes drilled through the floor of the upper- floor administration into the otherwise empty exhibition spaces below, creating something akin to a sculptural portrait of the institution’s internal processes.

Visitors to Sander’s exhibition in the Johnen Galerie location will sense 253 exhibitions: one that exists here and now and near 252 that existed in the past–many of them in this very space–which has now become slightly elevated.

Karin Sander was born in 1957 in Bensberg, in North Rhein-Westfalia, Germany. She studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart and at the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum in New York. From 1999 to 2007 Sander was professor at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. Since 2007 she holds a professorship at ETH Zurich Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

The artist has received numerous prizes, including the Villa-Romana-Prize, Florence (1993), Stipendium der Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (1993–1995), Rubens-Förderpreis der Stadt Siegen (1994), Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (1996), Hans-Thoma-Preis, Großer Landespreis für Bildende Kunst Baden-Württemberg (2011) and, most recently, the Rome-Prize of the German Academy in Rome, Villa Massimo, Rome (2014).

Sander’s work has been exhibited extensively. Notable solo exhibitions include: Karin Sander, Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp, Cully, Switzerland (2016); Karin Sander, Tongewölbe T25, Ingolstadt (2015); Identities on Display, Humboldt Lab Dahlem, Berlin (2013); Museumsbesucher 1:8, Lehmbruckmuseum, Duisburg (2013); Kernbohrungen, NBK, Berlin (2011); Gebrauchsbilder und Andere, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2010); Labor, K20 Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf (2010); Zeigen. Eine Audio-Tour durch Berlin, Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin (2009); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2002); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (1996) and Projects 46, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994).

Selected recent group exhibitions include: BRD, Fahrbereitschaft - Haubrok Foundation, Berlin (2016); The Distance of a Day: Connections and Disconnections in Contemporary Art, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2016); Human Scale, National Gallery of Canada-Musée des beaux-arts du Canada, Ottawa (2016); Künstlerräume, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart (2015); Prinzip Labor, Probebühne 7, Humboldt Lab Dahlem, Berlin (2015); Waywords of Seeing, Le Plateau, FRAC Ile de France, Paris (2014); When Now is Minimal, Museion, Bolzano (2014); Datascape. What You See is Not What You Get, Laboral, Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón (2014); Lens-Based Sculpture: The Transformation of Sculpture through Photography, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2014); 1980–NOW, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); Contemplating the Void. Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum’s Rotunda, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010).

The artist’s work is included in many important public collections, including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; National Museum, Osaka; Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Muzeum Artystów, Łódź; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Daimler AG Stuttgart, Deutsche Bank Frankfurt am Main and UBS AG Munich/Zurich.
 

Tags: Marcel Duchamp, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Karin Sander