Friday, 7 September 2018 6 – 10 p.m. 

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In 2018, DC Open – Dusseldorf Cologne Open Galleries – celebrates its tenth anniversary. For the tenth time, fifty-five galleries from the Rhineland invite the national and international art scene to their joint fall openings. On the occasion of this anniversary, SCHÖNEWALD is presenting ten | ten, an exhibition featuring ten selected artists from its art trade and gallery program. Forty works in four spatial sequences orchestrate a sublime curation.

One thematic complex of the exhibition is devoted to figuration. A museum work by Karin Kneffel depicts an interior from Haus Lange with Marc Chagall’s The Holy Cabman (1911–12). It is flanked by historical works by the artists Georg Baselitz and Sigmar Polke. Two eagle motifs from 1979 illustrate Baselitz’s approach of developing drawings on paper as an autonomous field of experimentation for gaining new forms between abstraction and the representational. The works were exhibited and published in the context of his legendary exhibition ADLER / EAGLE at Galerie Buchmann in Basel in 1987, which later travelled on to further venues. A complex work on paper by Sigmar Polke from 1975 was created while Polke was living alternately in Willich (near Düsseldorf) and Zurich, together with the ethnologist Katharina Steffen, as well as members of his family, friends and the artist Achim Duchow. He was rarely alone and constantly on the move. Polke loved nature with its powers of creation and its dreams of exalting possibilities. During this time, he made his first trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Works from this period visualise the fluid relationships and boundaries between media, classes and genders. Everything is simply in a ‘flow’.

Also on view are early drawings by Konrad Klapheck, whose erotic language of forms is reminiscent of the Surrealist motifs of Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy. These and one of his typewriter motifs are juxtaposed with display cases, drawings and a sculpture by Andreas Schmitten. Orientated aesthetically on Western consumer and commodity worlds, these works consciously or unconsciously make reference to positions within art history, including Marcel Duchamp and Donald Judd. At the same time, Schmitten’s works oscillate between a minimalist and an opulent language of forms, deliberately incorporating stage-like and theatrical elements of design and are thus particularly conspicuous.

Furthermore, works by Josef Albers, Antonio Calderara, Gotthard Graubner and Imi Knoebel pay tribute to Concrete Art and colour. Particularly noteworthy are the abstract composition of the recently rediscovered autodidact Antonio Calderara, which, in their stillness and balance, are reminiscent of the works of Giorgio Morandi. Through 1959, Calderara focused exclusively on figurative painting and, until his death – influenced by Albers, Malevich and Mondrian – created abstract moods of light on wood fibre and paper, in particular those referring to the landscape of Lago D’Orta.

Also on view are works by Gerhard Richter, one of the core expertises of Paul Schönewald’s art trade. Ten works on paper, canvas and behind glass provide insight into abstraction as a method of his painting.