A project of the Anna Polke Foundation with the Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal
“We should form a group,” demanded Konrad Lueg in an appeal to his fellow students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1963. Shortly afterwards, he organized an exhibition with Manfred Kuttner, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter in a vacant store—the start of several collaborative actions. In February 1964, the four artists took a selection of their works from the art academy to the renowned Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. They set up a presentation for gallery owner Rolf Jährling in the front garden of the villa, placing their pictures in the snow, leaning them against garden fences and protruding walls or hanging them on bushes and trees. That same year, Lueg, Polke, and Richter were invited to participate in a group exhibition (“Neue Realisten”, Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, 1964/65). The four artists, whose careers took very different paths, parted ways soon afterwards.
In a film installation conceived for the Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal, the artist group KONSORTIUM examines this unconventional action that went down in art history as the “Vorgartenausstellung” (Front Garden Exhibition). Using historical photos and documents relating to Galerie Parnass from the ZADIK archives and the artists’ estates, the group has reconstructed this now legendary action and explored the history of its reception, all while addressing issues concerning artists then and now: cooperation and competition, career strategies, individual circumstances, interests and decisions, and the mechanisms of the art world. KONSORTIUM builds a bridge between past and present that highlights the factors influencing artistic work and art history.
KONSORTIUM was founded as an exhibition space in Düsseldorf in 2004. Since 2008, the three artists Lars Breuer (b. 1974, lives in Cologne), Sebastian Freytag (b. 1978, lives in Cologne), and Guido Münch (b. 1966, lives in Düsseldorf) have been working as an artist collective under the name KONSORTIUM.
The exhibition was initiated by the Anna Polke Foundation and organized with the Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal. The project is accompanied by a cooperation with the ZADIK | Central Archive for German and International Art Market Studies and a seminar at the University of Cologne.
