veronika kellndorfer screens and sieves exhibition catalog

April 1, 2021

Christopher Grimes Projects is pleased to announce Veronika Kellndorfer's catalog for Screens and Sieves, her exhibition in the Mies van der Rohe house in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen.

The following excerpt from Dr. Wita Noack, Director of the Mies van der Rohe House, Berlin:

The dialogue could not have been more fitting, not more beautiful: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Neue National Galerie, or New National Gallery, on Veronika Kellndorfer's large glass works in Landhaus Lemke at the Obersee lake in Berlin. Our doors on the edge of the city had been opened wide for the icon that was closed. The exhibition "Screens and Sieves" not only brought together early and late works by Mies, the location pushed to extremes the artist's tenets, many of which revolve around vistas, reflections, and mirroring. But this was not a question of David versus Goliath, of large or small, of brick or glass, but solely one of Mies to the power of 3. How fruitful was the leap in time from Mies’ last realized project before he left Germany to the temple he built in a form of return? In this catalog, Veronika Kellndorfer describes how the Mies van der Rohe House challenged her, how she productively dealt with superimpositions and dissolutions, and how she works to attain that "tipping moment" in which architecture becomes image. She was looking for this moment in the Neue Nationalgalerie five years ago, when she took her cam - era into the exhibition space emptied of its artworks and awaiting renovation. She experienced a building that felt almost intimate, one that made her dwell on what Mies meant by his aesthetics of orderliness and how he succeeded in delineating territories. But Veronika Kellndorfer's works are also a commentary on the urban landscape at Berlin’s Kulturforum, which will undergo colos - sal changes in the coming years with the construction of the new Museum of the 20th Century by Herzog & de Meuron. And so the reflections of Scharoun and Stüler and the trees along the banks of the Landwehrkanal are perhaps also a reference to the great postwar history of West Berlin and the importance of its architecture.

The Mies van der Rohe House acted not only as a booster-amplifier for this exhibition, but also challenged the artist – like many before her – to reflect on the architecture. This international site for contemporary art draws its vitality not from a museum-like contemplation and worship of Mies' architecture, but from its openness to aesthetic interplay and creative convergence through topical art. "This house radiates into the city from its fringes," Veronika Kellndorfer says, by which she means that Mies' work can here be experienced in a very elemental way. This will continue, as the Mies van der Rohe House’s program is designed to tie this art space into the city even more tightly, to delve deeper still into the short period in which Berlin was the Bauhaus’ home, and to maintain the site’s unmistakable character. People who want to learn about Mies and his time in Berlin naturally go to the Neue Nationalgalerie. But to gain a better understanding, they should first visit the Lemke House.

Association of Friends and Patrons of the Mies van der Rohe House eV (ed.)
Ingolf Kern and Wita Noack in conversation with Veronika Kellndorfer (German / English)
60 pages, 17 images
Publisher: form + purpose
ISBN 978-3-947045-20-4