Doublings

A special highlight were the elaborate spatial installations that Gregor Schneider set up on the lower floor of the museum in April 2008.

Born in 1969, the artist was only sixteen when he began to rebuild the interior of an old house by constructing new rooms within existing ones, setting walls in front of other walls and windows in front of windows. He put whole rooms on turntables that rotated slowly around their own axes, installed ceilings that rose and sank and lead walls for insulation. Gregor Schneider finally moved into the house and utterly transformed it while living in it. After some time he expanded the concept of his work by completely dismantling individual rooms to rebuild them somewhere else with the original materials – as he did in the German pavilion at the Biennale in Venice in 2001. There, Schneider constructed the rooms exactly to scale: complete with cellars, various floors, stairs and main and adjoining rooms. A boundary between the interior of the pavilion and the old house could not be discerned by the visitors, they could only move around in the reconstructed old rooms. For this contribution, Schneider was honoured with the coveted Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale, which helped him to realize his ultimate international breakthrough. In the museum franz gertsch, Gregor Schneider created a series of rooms in which he set up sculptures displayed in a confusing and unsettling way.