I have to collect myself first

Everyone knows what collecting is. We know it from childhood: stones, shells, stickers … Artists and designers, too, are fascinated by things and like to experiment with them. Jakob Lena Knebl and Markus Pires Mata are specialists in mise-en-scène and enjoy working with painting as well as fashion, sculpture, and body images just as much as with craft traditions and popular culture. We have invited the two Viennese artists to put together a personal exhibition from the holdings of our universal collections. To that end, they also rummaged around in the storerooms of crafts, mineralogy, and zoology and in the process discovered objects that have not been shown in a long time.

Their spectacular installation humorously combines high and low and invites us to a sensory experience: provocative, brash, and eye-catching. Rather than following scholarly criteria, Knebl and Mata present constellations across collections, styles, and eras. They track down associative relationships in surfaces, themes, or colors and combine art, natural history, and design in unusual ways.

The show leaves much hanging in the air, so that—as in the cabinets of curiosities of the Renaissance—everything seems like part of a strange cosmos. The display wagers on transparency. The objects are not sorted scientifically but rather connected to one another by overlapping in diverse ways. Paintings float above the visitors’ heads, while minerals stand opposite artfully designed pieces of jewelry. Taxidermy mounts join in a dialogue with art objects. The private and the public mix; visitors are permitted to sit down on sofas and make use of a surprising living room in the forest. Animals are constant companions on their tour. The museum becomes a place that focuses on discovering, seeing, marveling, and grinning—and one can calmly collect oneself first.

In addition, in 2011 Knebl staged herself in allusion to Joseph Beuys’s revolutionary art concept of the “Fat Corner” and is now presenting her homage in the stairwell. She remade the sweeping body of Henri Laurens’s voluminous sculpture La grande baigneuse (Large Bathing Woman) in gaudy yellow plastic and gave it a comical wig. In Darmstadt, the two sculptures are meeting for the first time.

Knebl and Mata see themselves as transformers. They have created a spatial arrangement in which the meanings and evaluations of things can transform. They open up new perspectives on the familiar and challenge us to question ways of seeing. The exhibition thus becomes an aesthetic experience of relationships between human being, object, and society. They want to encourage a dialogue of diversity.

Curator: Gabriele Mackert

Curatorial assistance: Anika Manthey

With works of art and design objects by

Jakob Lena Knebl, Marina Abramović, John de Andrea, Peter Angermann, Adam Antes, Alexander Archipenko, Hans Arp, Älteste Volkstedter Porzellanmanufaktur , César Baldaccini, Ernst Barlach, Anna Bornemann, Eugen Bracht, Dumitru Haralamb Chipăruș, Theodorus A. C. Colenbrander, Lies Cosijn, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Erhart, Karl Fabergé, Lucien Gaillard, Hagen Häuser, Erwin Heerich, Heinrich Jobst, Axel Kasseböhmer , Kayserzinn, Christian Wilhelm Kehrer, Leonhard Kern, Heinrich Kirchner, Jan Knap, Georg Kolbe, Cornelius Kolig, Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur, Georg von Kovats, François-Raoul Larche, Henri Laurens, Léonard Agathon, Johannes Leonhard, Loetz, Francisco López, Wilhelm Loth, Aristide Maillol, Brigitte Matschinsky-Denninghoff, Otto Modersohn, Jules Moigniez, William Morgan, Matthijs De Naiveu, Hanns Pellar, Georges Pierre, Otto Ritschl, Rozenburg, Timo Sarpaneva, Bernard Schultze, Christel Schweizer, Johann Conrad Seekatz, Nicole Six/Paul Petritsch, Kiki Smith, Friedrich Stahl, Dieter Teusch, Johann Heinrich Tischbein d.Ä, Hermann Tomada, Henry Wilson, Tapio Wirkkala, Ossip Zadkine, Friedrich Zitzmann, Zsolnay