Roland Schefferski

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Roland Schefferski (* 1956 in Katowice , Poland ) is a German-Polish object and installation artist .

Life

Schefferski attended the Fine Arts High School in Wroclaw , Poland , from 1971 to 1976 . He then studied fine arts from 1976 to 1981 at the Academy of Fine Arts (now Academy of Fine Arts) in Wroclaw. In 1984 he moved to West Berlin. In 1989, as part of his own art project, he founded the art magazine WE A ST , which existed until 1991 , of which he was co-editor and which received international attention (including in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art , New York ). In 1986 he received first prize at the International Exhibition of Miniature Art in Toronto, and in 2000 the Lovis Corinth Prize from the Esslingen Artists' Guild . Schefferski lives and works in Berlin .

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Schefferski initially worked as a painter, draftsman and sculptor. At the beginning of the 1980s he turned to object art and finally concentrated on environments and installations . In addition, he moves in parallel realized actions and interventions in the field of different media and adapts his concepts to the special features of the places where he presents his work.

Sediment I (1999–2000), Center for Contemporary Art Gdańsk (2007)

During his studies he began to be interested in “marginal activities” in public space. He took part in collecting objects that were left behind by users of a telephone booth (1981–1983) as traces of everyday activity, and documented them. Alone or with the participation of others, he created similar process-like works such as Space Identification (1981–1984) or Unity and Duality (1983–1985) and the door installation at a Berlin gallery (1988–90). The actions to secure evidence were given the generic term Registration of a Thrown-away Reality . This was the title of his first solo exhibition in Toronto. After the collages, objects and assemblages created in the first half of the 1980s , he created a series of shadow reliefs based on human shadow outlines (1987–1990). Since the beginning of the 1990s he has been working on selected objects from everyday life that serve as triggers for memories and associations, stripping them of all narrative details, cutting out parts of them and thus provoking new thought processes. In doing so, he kept fragmented porcelain or faience discs with burned- in photographs in water-filled containers in various object installations . The broken photos were reminiscent of relics or biological preparations that should be protected from further destruction and "preserved" for future generations. Identity , forgotten traces and pictorial symbols of history are among the most important motifs of his art.

Empty Images (2000)

In the cycle of works of Erased Pictures , Schefferski discussed the process of repression that took place in Germany after the end of National Socialism from 1997–98 . Schefferski removed the motifs from old photographs and reduced their content to a narrow remaining margin. He proceeded similarly in the work Proletaryat (1998) with old Polish banknotes and in 2000 in Warsaw with posters in his advertising campaign for Berlin. With fifty billboards that he had put up in Warsaw, he invited the viewers to revise their prejudices against the Germans and to replace their inner ideas with new, tangible images. Each of the large-format posters, on which only the edges of official PR images of the German capital remained, bore the heading Make your own picture of Berlin .

The first work from the Empty Images cycle, which also began in 2000, was named after the newspaper Los Angeles Times, Friday, August 4 2000. In the following works Schefferski cut photographs out of newspapers and left only a colored border as a trace. The medium of the newspaper has thus become a sample taken from reality, which is subjected to subtle interventions in order to reflect the unclear situation between the images given by the media and our own ideas.

Berliner (2018–19), in the background photographs by Lee Friedlander in the exhibition Der Flaneur, Kunstmuseum Bonn

He created art that is defined by the context of its respective environment with the work cycle of pieces of clothing entitled Berliner (2000–2009 / 2019). In 2000, at the Center for Contemporary Art in Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw , he invited visitors to the Artpool Berlin exhibition to exchange their own outerwear in the cloakroom for jackets, jackets and coats that he had “marked” himself and with them to visit various exhibitions taking place in the art center. The artist had transformed these items of clothing into carriers of an emotional message by applying drawn and embroidered silhouettes of real people from Berlin. There was an interaction between the people wearing the clothes and the people portrayed in the silhouettes. So far, the action has been carried out with the participation of visitors in the Beyond Baroque Center in Los Angeles, in the Gallery L in Moscow and in the National Museum in Krakow. In Germany it took place in the Märkisches Museum / Museum Ephraim-Palais in Berlin and most recently in the Kunstmuseum Bonn.

His experiments in public space in the eighties later increasingly inspired him to locate his works outside the institutional art scene. This led to the fact that his works were sometimes not perceived as art or even caused outrage because they did not correspond to the common perception of art. The picture exchange project, realized in 1999, only consisted of exchanging the respective "wall decorations" from the apartment of a Polish woman in Słubice for pictures, photographs and posters of a German woman in Frankfurt / Oder. With this intrusion into the personal sphere, he put both women to the test and let them endure “the foreign” in their own four walls. In 1997/98 the artist put some of his works in a Berlin second-hand shop, and in 1998 in a Gdansk antique shop on commission, finally blurring the line between museum-historical and contemporary art, between art objects for sale and intellectual interference.

"That concerns you", action in public space, Frankfurt (Oder) / Słubice (2005)

Among the best known are Schefferski's coin campaigns in public space. In 2005 he deliberately “lost” coins minted especially for this occasion while walking along the German-Polish border near Frankfurt (Oder) and Słubice, in 2009 in downtown Warsaw and in 2017 in Berlin, in order to make the finders feel insecure about the supposedly to trigger a valuable find. However, the coins themselves were not important. The messages on them should stimulate the finder to think about the future of Europe (" That concerns you / To dotyczy ciebie", 2005), the globalized market economy " (Money) isn´t everything? / (Pieniądze) szczęścia nie dają "( 2009) or about an open society" Anderes Deutschland? / Another Germany? " (2017).

Since 1998 the artist has been inviting passers-by to take part in conversations he spontaneously organized, including on a Danube ship at the former border crossing in Štúrovo - Esztergom (2002) or on a street in Berlin-Neukölln (2006). He installed his works in glass elevators, apartments, shops, but also in the open air in castle, farm and allotment gardens ( Brandenburg 2006, 2008, 2009). For him, the question arises time and again whether his art can stand for itself and enter into a dialogue with a world that is full of stories, expectations and projections.

Solo exhibitions and projects (selection)

  • 1987: Registration of a Thrown-away Reality, Del Bello Gallery, Toronto
  • 1988: International Exhibition of Visual Poetry, Sao Paulo
  • 1988–89: The Door Installation, Paranorm Gallery, Berlin
  • 1990: Ceterum Censeo, (group exhibition), Künstlerhaus Bethanien , Berlin
  • 1991: How to Organize this World, (group exhibition), National Museum , Warszawa
  • 1992: Hausgeist, (group exhibition), gallery of the nGBK , Berlin
  • 1993: My Home is Your Home - Construction in Process IV, (group exhibition), Łódź
  • 1994: Recovered from memory, Concept Museum Galerie, Berlin
  • 1994: Schattensprung - 11 artists from Berlin, (group exhibition), Center for Contemporary Art - Ujazdowski Castle, Warszawa
  • 1994: Imaginary Hotel, (group exhibition), Buntgarnwerke - Elsterpark, Leipzig
  • 1995: Retro (per) spective, Galerie 21, St. Petersburg
  • 1996: Frammenti, Studioventicinque, Milano
  • 1996: Inserting Blank Spaces, Center for Contemporary Art - Ujazdowski Castle , Warsaw
  • 1997–98: Erased pictures, David Kirby's Secondhand Shop, in collaboration with Künstlerhaus Bethanien , Berlin
  • 1998: Where Are You From? - Rauma Biennale Balticum, Rauma Art Museum, Rauma, Finland
  • 1998: Fragmentation of Memory, in collaboration with the Center for Contemporary Art, Gdańsk
  • 1998: International Festival of Experimental Art and Performance, Central Exhibition Hall-Manege, St. Petersburg
  • 2000: Make your own picture of Berlin, in public space, Warszawa
  • 2000: Events that remain unnamed, Museum Ostdeutsche Galerie , Regensburg
  • 2000: Artpool Berlin, (group exhibition), Center for Contemporary Art - Ujazdowski Castle, Warszawa
  • 2000: Transit / performance, (group exhibition), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin Interim, (group exhibition), Museum Ostdeutsche Gallery, Regensburg                
  • 2001: To Begin Where We Are, with Jim McAninch, Beyond Baroque Gallery, Los Angeles,
  • 2002: Wiara, Nadzieja, Miłość / Believe, Hope, Love, Outdoor Gallery AMS, in the public space of several Polish cities
  • 2002: Aquaria - The fascinating World of Man and Water, (group exhibition), Landesgalerie at the Upper Austrian State Museum , Linz as well as art collections , Chemnitz
  • 2003: Inwentaryzacja / inventory, Lubusz Regional Museum, Zielona Góra
  • 2003: Sztuka w mieście / Art in the City, (group exhibition), Zachęta National Art Gallery , Warszawa
  • 2004: Dialog Loci - Bastion of Art, (group exhibition), Kostrzyn, Poland
  • 2004: The Outdoor Gallery AMS 1998-2002, (group exhibition), Arsenał Gallery, Poznań
  • 2005: L'Art dans la ville - La Pologne sur les murs, (group exhibition), Espace L Gallery, Boulogne-Billancourt, France
  • 2007: Empty Images, Center for Contemporary Art , Gdańsk
  • 2008: Translate: The Impossible Collection , (group exhibition), Instytut Sztuki, Gdańsk
  • 2009: ReConstruction, Pomonatempel, Potsdam
  • 2009: Wir Berliner - My Berlińczycy, (group exhibition), Märkisches Museum und Museum, Ephraim-Palais, Berlin
  • 2010: Mediations Biennale , Poznań
  • 2011: Erased Walls, (group exhibition), Space Gallery, Bratislava
  • 2012: Recall / From the Lives of Europeans, Lubusz Regional Museum, Zielona Góra
  • 2012: Berlińczycy, National Museum , Kraków
  • 2015: Comments on our garden, in public space, Berlin
  • 2017: Different Germany? / Another Germany? in public space, Berlin
  • 2018-2019: Die Berliner, Kunstmuseum, Bonn

Literature (selection)

  • Peter Funken: Roland Schefferski, in: Artforum International , February, vol. XXXIII, no. 6, 1995, New York, pp. 100-101
  • Ulrich Clewing: Possibilities of History - The Work of Roland Schefferski, in: The DG - a biannual journal of the arts , no.10.1999, editor: Host Publications, Austin, Texas, pp. 123–127
  • Christoph Rasch: A mosaic of memories from the historical remains collected by Roland Schefferski, in: Mare Articum - the Baltic Art Magazine , Issue 1-2 [4], editor: Wydawnictwo 13 Muz, Szczecin, 1999 pp. 54-57
  • Michael Haerdter: Roland Schefferski - a German-Polish border crosser, in: Amphibian zones - artists, arts and cultures, publisher: Kulturpolitische Gesellschaft, Bonn, 2005 pp. 142-148
  • Axel Feuss: Roland Schefferski - Artistic Strategies for Cultural Memory, in: Porta Polonica - The Documentation Center on the Culture and History of the Poles in Germany , Bochum 2015
  • Roland Schefferski: Dialogue of Cultures - Culture of Dialogue, in: VI International Conference The Meeting of Cultures - Catalog , publisher: Okręg Lubelski ZPAP, Muzeum Lubelskie, Lublin 2017, pp. 87–98
  • Axel Feuss: Roland Schefferski, in: General Artist Lexicon. The visual artists of all times and peoples, publisher: Verlag Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2018, volume 101 pp. 413-414

Video documentations

  • Ralf Roszius: Waiting room,   paranorm video documents , Paranorm Gallery Berlin 1987
  • Kadriye Acar: Art for Memory, Babylon, WDR , February 18, 1996, Cologne 1996
  • Hans Kropshofer: Roland Schefferski, Vier Tage Linz, Transpublic , Linz 2002
  • Waldemar Gruszczyński: Ludzie są epizodem - Ponad granicami , TVP3 , Poznań 2003
  • Simone Froböse: Return to sender, Divine Film , Berlin 2004
  • Ralf Roszius: Erased Pictures 1997, Paranorm Video-Documents , Bonn 2005
  • Simone Froböse: To dotyczy Ciebie - That concerns you, Divine Film , Berlin 2005
  • Simone Classen, Roland Schefferski: Our Garden, In ter ventur Berlin / Hamburg 2008
  • Roland Schefferski: They've just pulled over, In ter ventur Berlin / Hamburg 2009
  • Simone Classen, Roland Schefferski: Berliner, In ter ventur  Berlin / Hamburg 2009
  • Kasjan Borkowski:… szczęścia never dają? - ... isn't everything ?, In Situ, Warszawa 2009
  • Jacek Katarzyński: Recall, Kuturalne Puzzle , RTV Lubuska , Zielona Góra 2012
  • Mateusz Golis: Berlińczycy, In ter ventur Berlin 2013
  • Fleck Bogusław: Anderes Deutschland ?, Galeria UTP, Berlin 2017
  • Achim Hippel: D-Mark coins with a message, in: Berliner Abendschau , RBB Berlin June 9, 2017

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sztuka w mieście. Zewnętrzna Galeria AMS 1998 - 2002. Accessed June 12, 2019 (pl-PL).
  2. ↑ Lechosław Olszewski: L'art dans la ville. La pologne sur les murs, Bulogne 2004 . ( academia.edu [accessed June 12, 2019]).
  3. ^ Potsdamer Kunstverein e. V. - Exhibition archive: reKonstruktion - an environment by Roland Schefferski. Retrieved June 12, 2019 .
  4. ^ Peter Funken on Roland Schefferski. Retrieved June 11, 2019 (American English).
personal data
SURNAME Schefferski, Roland
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Polish object and installation artist
DATE OF BIRTH 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH Katowice , Poland