his year, Maurizio Cattelan is continuing the Synagogue Stommeln Art Project with a new, site-specific installation conceived exclusively for the outstanding art space. The exhibition in the former synagogue in Pulheim-Stommeln northwest of Cologne is on view from June 1 to August 10, 2008.
Maurizio Cattelan’s sculptures and lifelike scenarios are opened to many different interpretations and straightly confront the viewer with their ambiguous meanings. Maurizio Cattelan’s works oscillate between absurd humor and existential tragedy and while laughs and tears overlap, reality reveals itself magnified from an unexpected point of view.
Maurizio Cattelan is a virtuoso and at the same time a perfidious storyteller: his narrations leave the viewer in the hope for a happy end always coupled with a diffused sense of fear and alarm for a disaster that is looming. Death in fact is one of the most frequently recurring motifs in Cattelan’s oeuvre — it is the dark foil against which things that are apparently jocular, humorous, and disrespectful reveal a deep and threateningly serious force, standing behind his work as much as in reality.
For the Synagogue Stommeln Art Project, the artist has created a work which unrolls in two parts transgressing the spatial boundaries of the original exhibition venue and discovering the old St. Martin’s Church, here used for the first time as a contemporary art exhibition space. Maurizio Cattelan’s installation is a complex narrative questioning the historical relations between religions, their boundaries and possibilities, and moreover about the universal feelings of guilt and hope.
In fact, the two sites are linked every year by the Easter procession in Stommeln that from the synagogue brings the faithful across the train tracks and to the Old Church.
An apparently peaceful scene awaits the viewer at the synagogue in which young and undefended plants grow out of old and used shoes: as always new life starts from solid roots, often unexpectedly. As in a do-it-yourself apocalypse, Maurizio Cattelan’s new work suggests a precarious future after the calamity, a surreal possibility for order after chaos. A monument in reverse, this is a sculpture of a missing and yet strongly present and moving human being, animated by a nomadic religiosity.
A modern crucifixion appears after a short walk at the old St. Martin’s Church: on the exterior of the historical building a female figure materializes to the right of the tower opposed to the Christine memorial. A famous legend tells that the Blessed Christine of Stommeln was a medieval mystic who was misunderstood and expelled by the village community but later venerated for her stigmata and healing powers.
Playing with history and future, and rewriting stories from the past, Cattelan’s work often places itself in the context of traditional images while enquiring original ways of understanding. His new work in Stommeln is in immediate proximity to the local legend, but also a cut and paste from the history of art, and places itself between the depictions of the Madonna, a crucifixion and an outstanding image of peace and passion. But Maurizio Cattelan’s figure even avoids eye contact: with her back to the viewer and tied into a box, the sculpture becomes a symbol for immolation and at the same time a hymn for salvation.
Maurizio Cattelan’s work for the Synagogue Stommeln stands in the tradition of the exhibition project initiated in 1991 in which internationally renowned artists examine the specific spatial and historical circumstances of the site in a very individual way. Past contributors have been Richard Serra, Rosemarie Trockel, and Santiago Sierra, among a host of others.
Maurizio Cattelan was born in Padua in 1960. Since the 1990s, the Italian artist has had exhibitions in some of the most important museums of contemporary art in the world, among which are the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum für Moderne Kunst and Portikus in Frankfurt, and most recently, the Kunsthaus Bregenz. Maurizio Cattelan has participated in five of the Venice Biennales and in numerous group exhibitions, such as the Skulpturenprojekt Münster, Manifesta, and the Whitney Biennial.
Synagogue Stommeln
Hauptstrasse, behind house no. 85, 50259 Pulheim-Stommeln
Opening hours: Thu–Sat 4:00–7:00 p.m., Sun 1:00–7:00 p.m.
Old St. Martin’s Church
Ingendorferstrasse, 50259 Pulheim-Stommeln, all day
Synagogue Stommeln. A Project of the City of Pulheim
With the kind support of the parish church of St. Martinus, Stommeln.
Funded by: Kultur- und Umweltstiftung der Kreissparkasse Köln
Photos by Werner J. Hannappel
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