dear friends, there is some truth in the german expression "lying in your own pocket". we wanted to show rarities, printed works, graphics, multiples, posters, graphic portfolios, artist's books from our own collection from the field of constructive, concrete and experimental art. we wanted to go in search of precious individual pieces––almost forgotten, almost lost––by artists we knew personally, who became friends. often friends of the edition with its screen printing shop and the workshop "for everything", and often later also friends of the gallery.
as a gallery we almost always had the need for empty spaces. empty walls, empty floors and later also a sensible staircase and ceiling. often we succeeded, often we didn't (colombo's crooked staircase, or gary woodley's colourfully drawn line of contact between an art form and a purpose-built building form). these taboo-breakers made things easier for us. they made many things possible for many people. kunibert fritz, the artist and friend also lived here in the görbelheimer mühle, he loved to photograph and film such taboobreakers as documents. now he is dead and soon he will be buried.
designing an exhibition from our own stock and collection was supposed to make it easy for us, save on transport, commission lists, photos are supposedly available, but: think again! we have "lied into our own pockets", it is much more extensive and difficult than we ever thought. the goal, the rarity, remains, but as it turns out, it is not the only one. the exhibition is growing.
with our graphic portfolios, we realised very quickly that we didn't have the space. to show these series of pictures, you need a large museum, a library, an institution with lots of free walls. so the choice fell on a few of our own editions, on a few foreign editions that we had bought or exchanged for our own collection. also on possible commissions.
we knew the time and the goal was to be reasonable (to save costs), but in order to make a good exhibition, we were often tempted to bring this and that into our own collection. it was allowed to make this necessary.
in the end, there is even concrete poetry only with zeros.
so things wandered into this exhibition, e.g. the eye by stankowski or the sofa by zaha hadid and the fluctuating bands of colour in michael kidner's graphics. we were amazed that buckminster fuller made such graphics. we admire the fact that friedhelm tschentscher succeeded in creating a corten steel sculpture by making an incision, formed from a square and a circle, to create a residual path that he could bend up into a perfect square!
books with something punched out of their pages are almost always cheerful. (christa des carouge) the danger of becoming a flea market is averted by hygiene regulations, you can find our pictures, portfolios, objects and photos from a – z on the website. many people are involved in the exhibition. some of the artists, adelheid and camille hoffmann and this time the team are happy to see you.
with the "lost" from the drawers there was an immediate dispute, for some clearly for sale, for others associated with memories, with an outcry, no!––not for sale. in the end, we are glad that so much is hanging and standing here.
