MUSEEN HAUS LANGE AND HAUS ESTERS
10 - 12 FEBRUARY 2012

At the focus of attention for this weekend of MORE MIES are personal ties and relations which the internationally famous architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe established early on in his life. Apart from an extensive tour programme around Haus Lange and Haus Esters, we will look with Georgia van der Rohe at her father, present Lilly Reich and her relationship to Mies, and examine the encounter between Mies and Karl Ernst Osthaus.

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MUSEUM HAUS LANGE
18 MARCH - 19 AUGUST 2012

With his site-specific project Waiting for the Sun, Martin Schwenk (*1960 Bonn, lives and works in Düsseldorf) will transform Haus Lange into a wondrous herbarium, filled with a fantastic world of plants. It will be like a vessel, in which the most diverse forms of vegetation - whether fashioned in sculptures, on paper, or drawn on the walls - will extend throughout every room. Since the mid-1990s, Schwenk has turned his attention to those remnants of a highly cultivated nature that are to be found in the interstices of largely built-up urban spaces. Using material such as Perspex, polyester, foam rubber, plaster or plastic, he devises individual plant formations that seem graceful and bizarre, artificial and real - all at the same time. Martin Schwenk points with his fragile, temporary vegetation to our current, equivocal understanding of nature, which swings between a yearning for pristine naturalness and the virtual possibilities conjured up in the science lab.

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MUSEUM HAUS ESTERS
18 MARCH - 19 AUGUST 2012

Fabian Marcaccio (*1963 Rosario de Santa Fe, Argentina, lives and works in New York, USA) first came to the attention of a larger audience in 2002 through the painted installation he staged at the documenta 11. In the last few years Marcaccio has returned to his earlier abstract Paintant works, now charging their structures with topical socio-political themes. With his latest Rope Paintings, which he develops using lengths of hemp and climbing ropes, Marcaccio has achieved in addition a relief-like presence of untold chromaticity, which literally leaps out into space. The series of approx. 15 works done specially for Haus Esters are chiefly dedicated to themes from the dark underbelly of recent American history: topics such as the Mexican drug wars, the Waco disaster in Texas, the mass suicide commanded by Jim Jones in Guyana, the Fallujah massacre or the Columbine High School shootings.
Parallel to this the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg will exhibit sculptural works which Marcaccio created for his Berlin exhibition as Bernhard Heiliger Prize Winner (2011) under the title The Structural Canvas Paintants (16 March - 17 June 2012).

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MUSEEN HAUS LANGE AND HAUS ESTERS
31 AUGUST - 2 SEPTEMBER 2012

1928 in Krefeld: Mies van der Rohe commenced work on Haus Lange and Haus Esters on Wilhelmshofallee. With that, two modernist buildings started to grow within a rather traditional context. The Krefelder Architekturtage MORE MIES is dedicated to the image of the city at that time and will examine buildings erected slightly before and at the same time by for example August Biebricher in the light of such aspects as their architectural language and social meaning.

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MUSEUM HAUS LANGE
30 SEPTEMBER 2012 - 1 APRIL 2013

In her paintings and sculptures Anne Chu (*1959 New York, USA, lives and works in New York) is above all interested in historical themes which she uses to instigate dialogues between western and Asian cultures. She mines history like a quarry and brings it up to date with its contemporary reception. The artist has drawn up a special concept just for the Mies van der Rohe villa in Krefeld, in which totally divergent characters from the bygone world of antiquity populate the building and lend it a strikingly different, anti-modernist atmosphere. Thus for instance brightly painted plaster cherubs waft in every direction through the clarity of the rooms. The model for these angelic beings came from the Roman frescoes in Pompeii and Herculaneum. In addition, Anne Chu has looked back to Roman statues in a series of coloured gouaches. She simplifies and defamiliarises these antique models - which often enough are Roman copies of Greek originals - with overlapping planes of colour and a distinctive free line.
Museum Haus Lange will be presenting the work of Anne Chu for the first time in Germany.

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MUSEUM HAUS ESTERS
30 SEPTEMBER 2012 - 1 APRIL 2013

Paul Wember is legendary as a great man of the museum world and a major proponent of contemporary art. In the 1950s and 60s he presented young artists like Arman, Alexander Calder and Yves Klein in the Krefelder Museen when scarcely another German museum was interested in these young rebels. Around 1960 a special collection was initiated under Wember's direction that is unique in both its diversity and quality, and which permanently established Krefeld as a centre for contemporary art: kinetics. With this new approach the boundaries between the genres in art - as for instance between sculpture and painting - were blown away in a trice. Movement, light and sound were no longer simulated with paint, but introduced as real physical elements in the works. The collection of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld presents a broad panorama from the artistic experiments that were created at that time: vibrating pictures, three-dimensional light-works, rotating objects, sound sculptures, and even interactive art objects which the visitor can shape.
The Kunstmuseen Krefeld will celebrate the 100th birthday of Paul Wember (*1913 Recklinghausen - 1987 Krefeld) with a representative selection of its kinetic objects in Museum Haus Esters. Alongside works by such luminaries as J. Tinguely, J. R. Soto, D. Roth and V. Vasarely, there will also be an opportunity to discover fascinating works by lesser-known artists such as A. Palatnik.

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