31/08/2024, 4:00 pm – 12:00 am,

Nacht der Museen und Galerien 2024

, Stadthausgalerie Münster

As part of the Nacht der Museen und Galerien, the exhibition Ludger Gerdes: Synkategoremata can be visited until midnight in the Stadthausgalerie on Platz des Westfälischen Friedens.

Synkategoremata presents five bodies of work made between 1981 and 1996, that give insight into Gerdes’ analysis of public environments, his interpretation of the subject relations within them, and his idealistic vision for an art of social utility, one in which public language, public images and public space could be mediums through which art could reflect and represent everyday life, rather than abstracting from it.

Gerdes’ relationship with Münster began in 1975, with his enrollment at the University of Fine Arts Münster (Institut für Kunsterzieher, then a department of the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie). He studied under Timm Ulrichs and Lothar Baumgarten for three semesters before transferring to Gerhard Richter’s class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1977. Gerdes returned to Münster in 1987, thanks to a career-defining invitation by Klaus Bussmann and Kasper König to participate in the 1987 Skulptur Projekte, its second ever iteration. For this, Gerdes produced Schiff für Münster (Ship for Münster) (1987), a large-scale public intervention, which subsequently entered the Public Collection as a permanent work. In many ways Schiff is Gerdes’ most significant work and he returned to its themes of idealism, individualism, existentialism, communication and social cooperation, over the course of his career.

The work was conceived as an island in the shape of a 40 metre long, 10 metre wide barge, similar to those seen on the Dortmund-Ems Canal. It was made of bricks, surrounded by a wide moat and covered with grass. A temple-like pavilion stands in place of the boat’s wheelhouse and two poplar trees—today, several metres tall—were planted as masts. Schiff is a work given to associative interpretation. It elicits the literary idea of society as a raft lost at sea, the individual as an island, the moat as a defensive system and the garden as erotic zone between nature and culture, while its temple-pavillion recalls the historic use of islands as mausoleums. The existential undertow of the work is redoubled by its location and orientation: moored on the city fringe, it points like an arrow, directly at the city’s three major religious institutions: St. Paul's Cathedral, St. Lambert's Church and the Überwasserkirche.