Bauen und töten gives an insight into the most significant steps in Gregor Schneider’s career. Spanning from early performative and photographic endeavors to more recent artworks, the exhibition ultimately circles back to the artist’s legendary Gesamtkunstwerk, the Haus u r in Rheydt, Germany — an ongoing work started in 1985 – in order to explore the boundaries drawn by the possibilities and impossibilities of artistic representation, as well as the tension between collective and personal memory – all motifs remarkably crucial to Schneider’s practice.

The exhibition is a call back to 2001, the year Schneider won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale with Haus u r. The Gesamtkunstwerk radically upset the inner and outer structures of the German pavilion: the artist removed the country’s letters from the building’s façade, replaced the German flag with that of the city and repurposed the space by installing a matryoshka of rooms dismantled and taken from his family house in Rheydt.

By decentering the 2001 installation, the exhibition aims to unveil the passageways and conceptual interconnections that mark Schneider’s practice before and after this date, shedding light on the most significant elements of his research and aspiring to deliver the profound complexity of the artist’s world. The works on display span from early performative and photographic endeavours from the 1980s, through the Goebbels’ house (Odenkirchener Straße 202, Rheydt 2014), the Kolkata series (It’s all Rheydt, Kolkata 2011), sculptures belonging to the Repeated objects series and the Insulated boxes series (such as Child (sitting without head) no. 1, Rheydt 2004), to videos from the extirpated villages in the Rhenish coal district near Rheydt (Sunny demise, Tagebau Hambach, 2022).

Displayed on the first and second level of Palazzo Caracciolo di Avellino, headquarters of Fondazione Morra Greco, the exhibition is designed to blend in with its surroundings – the 18th-century painted walls of the first floor and the stucco and painting ornaments on the second – that add yet another degree of questioning and complexity to the never-ending and visionary wish of Gregor Schneider, which is to unpack all the material and symbolic implications of the places we inhabit and make our memories in.

(Texts curated by Giulia Pollicita)