ON THE OCCASION OF HIS 100TH BIRTHDAY
16.3. TO 28.7.24 (EXTENDED UNTIL 8.9.24)
On February 18, 2024, Günter Haese (1924 to 2016) would have been 100 years old. To mark the occasion, the Sprengel Museum Hannover is dedicating a separate room to him in the collection presentation "Adventure Abstraction".
After studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, Günter Haese began working in the early 1960s with materials that reflected the economic miracle rather than the art world: brass wire, cogwheels, metal plates and spring coils - materials and utensils from the engineering, precision mechanics and watchmaking sectors. Haese meticulously and skillfully assembles them into highly fragile, poetic-looking sculptures: Steel springs and delicate brass wires, which look like antennae or seismographic measuring instruments, convert every breath of air into trembling and movement, thus coming into direct contact with their surroundings and indicating this as a kind of communication of movement.
Haese experienced a meteoric rise that was probably unique in the art world: after his first solo exhibition at the Ulm Museum in 1964, he was immediately invited to documenta 3 and finally to a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the same year. This was followed by the Venice Biennale in 1966 and numerous other exhibitions. Of the works now on display, "Ein anderer Mond" (1963), "Kleine Antille I" (1968), "Samarkand II" (1989) and "Turm/Säule" (Zaragoza, 1996) remain in the Sprengel Museum Hannover as a gift from Günter Haese jr.
Curated by Reinhard Spieler