Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin acquires work by Veronika kellndorfer

October 11, 2021

Veronika Kellndorfer’s work National Gallery, reflecting ashlars has been acquired by the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. 

An icon of twentieth-century architecture The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin was planned and built from 1963 to 1968, the steel and glass structure is the only building designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Europe after his emigration to the United States. The refurbishment, headed by David Chipperfield Architects, has successfully restored and renewed the building to its original identity of high modernist architecture.

In her photographs of Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie, Kellndorfer exposes the gap between our idea of the building and its actuality. Her work Reflecting Ashlars, 2017 shows the empty museum at the beginning of a process of restoration revealing its raw materiality; the original steel, glass, and stone coexist with the stacks of materials waiting to be removed, amidst the dust and dirt of the construction site. In her documentation of change—when the building was simultaneously unraveling and becoming—Kellndorfer offers us new access to understand and reconstruct the history of this body of work.

The silkscreens show the Neue Nationalgalerie in a historic in-between state that will never be seen this way again. Inspired by the museum’s glass composition, Kellndorfer calls into question the complex relationship between reflection and transparency. Traces of time and daily life are caught in the reflections of the inside and the exterior of the building, for example in the base plates lying ready to be restored, which she calls Reflecting Ashlars.

National Gallery, Reflecting Ashlars has been exhibited at the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Chicago, IL. 
 

You may view her architectural portfolio here.

For more information on Veronika, please visit her artist page here.