Ausstellungseröffnung: GEDANKENGEBÄUDE von Ingo Gerken

An artist talk with Ingo Gerken and Elke Falat will take place at 15:00.

Werner Düttmann's library can easily be read as a world design and as the core of the entire Hansaviertel. The urban spatial structures and feelings of space converge here democratically from all sides into flat-built elegance. Social exchange and architectural understanding can develop undisturbed (with a view inwards and outwards) at the quiet pool of the bungalow.

Ingo Gerken approaches this public source of books in the environs of the buildings of a former modernism and distils loose sculptures from the library stock. His "Bibliosculptures" conceived for the Hansabücherei are actually works of art related to the building, because they not only belong here anyway according to the VÖBB register, but above all deal with the history of the origins of this place and its urban planning environment.

For his part, Ingo Gerken turns the selected books into a place and a setting for his artistic appropriation when their contents become the pictorial context and the cornerstone of his sculptural ideas.

For the exhibition in the Hansa Library, Ingo Gerken has designed a small exhibition architecture that incorporates original building elements, but gently shifts its spatial focus. Düttmann's ideal of a threshold-free transition between in and out is once again reflected when the large window front of the foyer acts as a view, mirror and display, combining the view into the books with the perspectives into the urban space.

The exhibition can be seen in the Hansa Library until May 30, 2025.

Ingo Gerken (*1971, Lippetal) studied at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts Kiel and at the Glasgow School of Art. His site-specific interventions, sculptures and photographs often reject a fixed materiality and instead advocate the purely condensed moment.