Udo Kittelmann

From 1989 until his death in 2007, Horst Ademeit documented the presence of "cold rays"--unseen negative forces permeating everyday objects--in thousands of Polaroids and digital photographs, as well as notebooks full of meticulously logged data. Secret Universe shows images of the "cold rays" at work, in enigmatic images of street scenes, grocery items and bizarre measuring instruments.

As artists, they were self-taught and created a cosmos of images that still captivates us today with its sensual immediacy and has made a lasting mark in art history on the work of non-academically trained artists: Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), Camille Bombois (1883–1970), André Bauchant (1873–1958), Louis Vivin (1861–1939) and Séraphine Louis (1864–1942). They are counted among the so-called circle of the "painters of the sacred heart"; their scenarios, often borrowed from nature, especially flowers and fruits, but also people in parks and landscapes, indicate a closeness to nature, a sensitive approach to the things of the immediate environment, with which they apparently sought to escape the coldness of uprising modernism. These French pioneers of authentic art were discovered by the German art historian Wilhelm Uhde (1874–1947), who organized their first joint exhibition in Paris in 1928.

The paintings of Katharina Grosse can appear anywhere. Her large-scale works are multi-dimensional pictorial worlds in which walls, ceilings, objects, and even entire buildings and landscapes, are coated with splendid color. For the exhibition It Wasn’t Us, the artist has transformed the Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, as well as the outdoor space behind the building, into an expansive painting which radically destabilizes the existing order of the museum architecture. The painting’s support consists of the floor of the hall and a group of polystyrene forms designed specifically for the exhibition, which Grosse transposed into their final size in several working stages and through incremental changes of scale. The painting stretches beyond the building’s confines and into public space, onto the vast grounds behind the museum, and across the façade of the Rieckhallen. It Wasn’t Us does not connect interior and exterior, museum and environment, or culture and nature. Rather, it renegotiates our viewing habits and our forms of thought and perception. Katharina Grosse (*1961, Freiburg im Breisgau), one of the most profiled female painters on the international contemporary art scene, studied at the Kunstakademie Münster, as well as at the Düsseldorf Academy, where she was also a professor from 2010 to 2018. Her works have been seen in renowned museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (2019), the National Gallery in Prague (2018), the chi K11 art museum in Shanghai (2018), and MoMA PS1 in New York (2016), and at several biennials and triennials, including Aarhus (2017), Venice (2015), and Curitiba (2013). EXHIBITION: Hamburger Bahnhof –Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, June 14, 2020–January 01, 2021