Art historian Raimund Stecker looks back at the ever-changing work of German artist Gregor Schneider, who has been transforming his own domestic world since his youth.
Since 1985, Gregor Schneider has occupied an abandoned house next to one of the largest chasms in the world—the lignite-rich surface mine near Rheydt-Mönchengladbach known as the Garzweiler—which is also next to where his parents ran their business. In the building, which he named Haus u r, he proceeded to build rooms within rooms. These eerie spaces are constructed from materials salvaged from the houses that were to be crushed by juggernaut-sized bucket-wheel excavators to expand the mine.
With this publication, art historian Raimund Stecker reconnects with his first visit to Haus u r. Schneider and Stecker have known each other since the artist's student years at the Münster Academy of Art in the late 1980s. In 1992, Stecker curated one of Schneider's first exhibitions, and has closely followed his career ever since.
Published on the occasion of Konschthal Esch's inaugural exhibition in 2021-2022, curated by Christian Mosar.
Gregor Schneider is a German artist. He was born on 5 April 1969 in Rheydt—now Mönchengladbach-Rheydt—where he lives to this day, right next to the Garzweiler brown coal open-cast mine. Thanks to the massive structural change in this area, with its "dying villages and newly emerging villages", he identifies with the city of Esch. That subject forms the basis of many of his works.
From 1999 to 2003, Schneider was a visiting professor and guest speaker at various art colleges, including: De Ateliers in Amsterdam, Netherlands, the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany, and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Denmark, AA School of Architecture in London, England, and Yale School of Art in New Haven, USA. Gregor Schneider was appointed Professor of Sculpture at the University of the Arts in Berlin (UDK Berlin) in 2009 and Professor of Sculpture at the University of Fine Arts in Munich (HFBK Munich) in 2013. Since 2016, he has held a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf (Kunstakademie Düsseldorf).
