Albert Leo Peil, Peter Kraus mit der Götterfrucht der Gorgo Medusa, 1979

 

Dear friends,

since our founding in 1988, at that time as Galerie Susanne Zander, we have promoted artistic positions that, for want of a better term, have been labelled as ‘Art Brut’ or ‘Outsider Art’ by the art world at large.From the beginning, our aim was to illuminate the valuable work of those artists whose eccentricities, impairments or lack of university degrees saw them thoughtlessly and brutally excluded and pigeonholed.

While societal progress is always fragile, times have changed, and we are delighted that the works of our artists have now found their place within the contemporary art context. Artists like Dietrich Orth, Adelhyd van Bender, Horst Ademeit, the project ‘Margret – Chronicle of an Affair’ have all gained visibility; solo exhibitions are held in important institutions, and their works are now represented in the collections of major museums.

While we are conscious of what we have achieved for this particular form of art and the recognition enjoyed by our artists, we do not want to perpetuate any categorisation of it and them through our own programme. And so it in this spirit that we will cease gallery activities at the end of our current exhibition.

We shall continue to manage the estates of Horst Ademeit, Adelhyd van Bender, Aurel Iselstöger, The Night Climbers of Cambridge, Bruno Schleinstein and Type 42 for the time being, along with that of Albert Leo Peil, whose body of work we only recently opened up.

Our thanks go to all of those who have accompanied us on our journey, by following and contributing to our programme over the years; who inspired, supported and encouraged us, and share our passion for art. Thank you for the memories.

Nicole and Susanne


current exhibition / laufende Ausstellung
HORST ADEMEIT, SAIOA FISCHER ABAIGAR
Ich fordere Sie auf, das Einsteigen in Meine Wohnung zu unterlaßen!
Sept 3 – Oct 30, 2021

HORST ADEMEIT / SAIOA FISCHER ABAIGAR

Ich fordere Sie auf, das Einsteigen in Meine Wohnung zu unterlaßen!

September 3 – October 30, 2021 

Horst Ademeit (*1937 in Cologne, †2010 in Düsseldorf) attended the Cologne Art and Craft Schools from 1964 onwards, later obtaining a diploma in Textile Design in Krefeld. In 1970, he spent a short period as a student of Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. From early on, Ademeit’s work was intensely engaged with the possible existence of cold rays. 

The artist observed his surroundings over a period of several decades, documenting the results in thousands of analogue, digital and Polaroid photographs. The focus of his interest was on the seemingly random events that occurred in and around his home in Düsseldorf’s Flingern district. 

 In addition to his written accounts, Ademeit would record comments, dates and locations in the white borders of his Polaroids, while also collecting and preserving what he saw as relevant traces and clues from the scenes he encountered. In the course of his investigations, he developed his own system for recording cold rays, one in which facts and assumptions were deeply interwoven with one another. His work has been regularly exhibited in galleries and museums since 2008. 

To accompany the opening of the exhibition, we will present the book ‘Der Fotograf der Kältestrahlen – Horst Ademeit’, by Saioa Fischer Abaigar (*2001 in Freiburg i. Br.), in which the author provides a candid account of her fascination with Ademeit, exploring his work through drawings, photographs and texts. In doing so, she raises questions about Ademeit’s artistic process and what it means to live as an outsider in our society. Not only does the young artist offer us an insight into her own, entirely personal world of thinking, she also represents a new generation that is social, critical, and politically engaged. The book is published by the Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König and Franz König. Fischer Abaigar has been a student at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne since 2020. We are very pleased to be able to present the drawings from the book in the gallery. 

 A slide show of Ademeit’s daily images selected by James Richards (*1983 in Cardiff) will a be on view during the exhibition.