22/08/2024, 6:00 pm,

Guided tour through the exhibition Ludger Gerdes: Synkategoremata and visit of Kirschensäule by Thomas Schütte with Lisa Petersohn

, Stadthausgalerie Münster

In 2024, Ludger Gerdes would have turned 70 and the Kunsthalle Münster would like to take this as an opportunity to focus on his work and contextualize it with an exhibition at the Stadthausgalerie.

Ludger Gerdes was a versatile practitioner: painter, sculptor and photographer, but also writer and theorist. He turned to these media episodically to develop his enduring aesthetic and philosophical investigation into the possibilities of artistic autonomy in public space. By bringing together sculptures and paintings that Gerdes created in the 1980s with one of the artist's most ambitious works from the 1990s, the photographic series Public Space – Private View, a further insight into the artist's work is provided. His photographic study of urban and rural environments, which considers the role of art beyond the institutions and target groups that normally structure it, seems particularly important in the context of the Public Collection.

While studying at the Düsseldorf Academy in the early 1980s, Gerdes befriended a group of artists who shared an interest in sculpture, architecture and model making which is why they became known as the Modellbauer. Gerdes was instrumental in the intellectual direction of the group and wrote extensively about their work in the context of utopian political philosophy, aesthetics and architecture. For Gerdes, the model was not just a question of scale, but a source of critical thinking. His idea of the thought model provided a framework for artistic creation in the form of a sketch, a plan or a text. Part of the group Modellbauer was Thomas Schütte, whose work Kirschensäule, like Gerdes' Ship for Münster, was created for Skulptur Projekte in 1987. Gerdes shares an interest in creating art for public spaces with Schütte and the latter's Kirschensäule is a commentary on the common instrumentalization of art to enhance public spaces and facades.

In the guided tour, Lisa Petersohn will give insights into the artistic positions of Ludger Gerdes and, after a visit of the exhibition, will invite visitors to a walk to Kirschensäule by Thomas Schütte. You can find further information on the work of Thomas Schütte here.