15/09/2024, 3:00 pm,

Curator's tour through the exhibition Ludger Gerdes: Synkategoremata with Merle Radtke

, Stadthausgalerie Münster

In the guided tour, Merle Radtke, the curator of the exhibition Synkategoremata and director of Kunsthalle Münster, will give insights into Ludger Gerdes’ artistic work.

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. 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. While studying at the Düsseldorf Academy in the early 1980s, Gerdes befriended a group of artists known as Modellbauer who shared an interest in sculpture, architecture and model making. 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.

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.