Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
The Schirn Kunsthalle in the old town of Frankfurt am Main , also known colloquially as the Schirn , is one of the most famous exhibition venues in Europe. The Schirn was opened in 1986 and has since shown over 200 exhibitions . It does not have its own collection, but organizes temporary exhibitions and projects on selected topics or the work of individual artists. As an art gallery, the Schirn enjoys a national and international reputation, thanks to its own productions, publications and exhibition collaborations with institutions such as the Center Pompidou , the Tate Gallery , the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum , the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg and the Museum of Modern Art in New York has acquired.
Location and architecture
The Kunsthalle Schirn was designed and built from 1983 by the architecture office BJSS ( Dietrich Bangert , Bernd Jansen , Stefan Jan Scholz and Axel Schultes ). The opening took place on February 28, 1986. The art gallery offers a total of 2000 square meters of exhibition space.
The Schirn stands in the middle of Frankfurt's old town . The building, which is very elongated in east-west direction, lies between the old town streets Bendergasse in the north and Saalgasse in the south, which were destroyed in the air raids on Frankfurt am Main in World War II, and which were completely redesigned after 1945 . The western end of the building is near the Nikolaikirche and the Römerberg , pretty much exactly where the five-finger cookie was until it was destroyed in World War II . The eastern end connects to the south portal of the tower of the imperial cathedral .
The art hall, clad in light sandstone, consists of several nested structures, each of which has a geometric floor plan. The most striking component is an east-west direction, about 140 meters long and 10 meters wide five-storey hall, the actual exhibition building. Towards Bendergasse, the ground floors of this nave are designed as an open colonnade, a strict sequence of unadorned square pillars. Bangert designed the nave as a reminiscence of the Uffizi building in Florence. Since the Bendergasse slopes down to the east and is led over stairs, this arcade is one story in the area of the rotunda, but two stories high at the cathedral.
These arcades form the southern border of the Archaeological Garden . Its eastern limit is the cathedral tower, its northern limit until 2011 is the technical town hall .
A little to the west of the center of this nave, further components are arranged along an imaginary transverse axis: in the south, towards Saalgasse, a multi-storey cube on a rectangular floor plan (approx. 18 × 24 m), followed by a long rectangular widening parallel to the nave. On the northern side of the main axis, next to the main hall, follows the most striking part of the Schirn, the rotunda crowned by a glass dome , which forms the monumental main entrance with a diameter of around 20 meters. It is the tallest part of the Schirn, but does not have any floors, but rather forms a single open space. The access to the Schirn is located here.
A ravine cut into the building leads through the rotunda along the old Bendergasse. To the north, beyond the alley, is another semicircular component, which has the same center of a circle as the rotunda with a little more than twice the radius. This part, separated from the actual exhibition hall by Bendergasse, houses the Schirn-Café . In the eastern end of this component, a rectangular opening is finally incorporated, in which an approximately two-story, oversized, but non-functional table stood at street level , which was demolished in August 2012 as part of the Dom-Römer project , the reconstruction of Frankfurt's old town has been.
Together with the Kunsthalle, two rows of houses separated from each other by the southern Schirn cube were built directly to the south, i.e. on the north side of the street on Saalgasse. The houses have typical old town proportions and plot sizes, but are all designed in the style of the 1980s, in a sometimes very colorful postmodern style. The art gallery and rows of houses are grouped around two semi-public (i.e. accessible, but not publicly used) inner courtyards that compensate for the difference in height between Bendergasse and Saalgasse (cathedral hill): access from the Saalgasse houses to the inner courtyard is via the first floor.
Since 2002 the Schirn has had a new interior designed by the architects Kuehn Malvezzi . The foyer is bathed in changing colors using modern RGB lighting technology.
In connection with the completed demolition of the nearby Technical Town Hall , the architect Christoph Mäckler suggested, among others , that parts of the Schirn should also be demolished in order to be able to enclose the historic coronation path from the Imperial Cathedral to the Römerberg with buildings. After Bangert initially invoked his copyright to defend his work, he later agreed to a compromise that called for the demolition of the “Big Table” on the north side of the building. This was made possible by the Dom-Römer project for the reconstruction of several valuable old town buildings between 2012 and 2016.
history
The name Schirn is derived from the history of its location. The word originally referred to an open sales stand and comes from the Old High German scranna , became the Middle High German Schranne and later became Scherne or Schirn . Where the Schirn Kunsthalle is today, it was the center of the densely populated old town of Frankfurt until it was destroyed on March 22, 1944 . Until the middle of the 19th century, the stalls of the Frankfurt butchers' guild were located in the narrow streets between today's Schirn and the Main .
After several unsuccessful attempts, this part of the old town was only rebuilt in the early 1980s . Because of its architecture, which bursts the historical proportions and disregards the sight lines of the cathedral and the Römerberg, the planning for the Schirn was controversial from the start. In the course of the Dom-Römer project, the demolition of the building, which was not typical of the old town, and a new building elsewhere, such as the technical town hall, were considered . If the rotunda were exposed and the porch with the Schirn-Café, which does not belong to the gallery, was partially torn down, a complete reconstruction of the coronation path on the south side of the Old Market would be possible.
From 1985 to 1993, the Schirn was headed by Christoph Vitali , who was also the managing director of the Kulturgesellschaft Frankfurt mbH. He established the Schirn as an exhibition venue. His successor was Hellmut Seemann , who went to Weimar in June 2001 as President of the Klassik Stiftung . Since October 2001 the Austrian Max Hollein , who also took over the management of the Städel and the Liebieghaus in January 2006, has been running the Schirn. With provocative titles, extraordinary exhibitions and improved financial resources, he tripled the audience at the Schirn. His successor - at the three named houses - was Philipp Demandt with effect from October 1, 2016 .
Exhibitions
Since its opening, the Schirn has hosted large overview exhibitions on, for example, Viennese Art Nouveau, Expressionism , Dada and Surrealism , German Pop , the history of photography or current positions in sound art, on topics such as shopping art and consumption, visual art the Stalin era, the Nazarenes or the new romanticism in contemporary art. Artists such as Wassily Kandinsky , Alberto Giacometti , Henri Matisse , Julian Schnabel , James Ensor , James Lee Byars, Yves Klein , Peter Doig , Lászlo Moholy-Nagy , Georges Seurat , Jeff Koons , Edvard Munch , Théodore Géricault and Helene Schjerfbeck were shown in monographic exhibitions presented. Contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn , Ayşe Erkmen , Carsten Nicolai, Jan De Cock, Jonathan Meese , John Bock, Michael Sailstorfer, Terence Koh, Aleksandra Mir, Eberhard Havekost , Mike Bouchet, Yoko Ono and Tobias Rehberger were presented in large solo exhibitions.
By 2019 the Schirn Kunsthalle had over 8.8 million visitors to over 240 exhibitions.
Edvard Munch was one of the five most popular exhibitions . The Modern View (2012), Wassily Kandinsky - The First Soviet Retrospective (1989), Esprit Montmartre . The Bohème in Paris around 1900 (2014), Women Impressionists - Berthe Morisot , Mary Cassatt , Eva Gonzalès , Marie Bracquemond (2008), Henri Matisse - Drawing with Scissors (2002).
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Art theft in the Schirn
On July 28, 1994 from the Schirn in an art theft three paintings of the exhibition Goethe and art stolen. The works were light and colors and shadows and darkness by William Turner (on loan from the Tate Gallery London ) and the oil painting Nebelschwaden by Caspar David Friedrich (on loan from the Hamburger Kunsthalle ). The pictures had an insured total value of 70 million DM (35.8 million euros). Three perpetrators were caught and sentenced in 1999 to prison terms of up to eleven years. In 2000 and 2002, Turner's two pictures reappeared. In 2003 the picture by C.-D. Friedrich will be returned to the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
literature
- Fabian Famulok: The entire art-mediating content in Schirn's communication is based on storytelling . In: Social Media and Museums II - the digitally expanded narrative space: A guide to getting started with storytelling and developing online-offline projects in museums . January 1, 2016, p. 137–140 , doi : 10.5281 / zenodo.202428 ( zenodo.org [accessed June 15, 2017]).
- Laura J. Gerlach : The Schirner success. The "Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt" as a model for innovative art marketing. Concepts - strategies - effects. ISBN 978-3-89942-769-1
Web links
- Literature by and about Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in the catalog of the German National Library
- Official website
- Exhibitions since 2002
- Schirn Mag - the magazine of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Individual evidence
- ^ Dietrich Bangert, Nils Ballhausen, Doris Kleilein: Interview with Dietrich Bangert. In: Bauwelt. Bauverlag BV GmbH, July 24, 2009, accessed on June 2, 2019 .
- ^ Dom-Römer project - concept and completion, accessed on March 22, 2015.
- ↑ History and pictures of the old Frankfurt Schirnen - altfrankfurt.com, accessed on March 22, 2015.
- ↑ Max Hollein: The history of the Schirn Kunsthalle, part 1 February 10, 2011, accessed on February 10, 2011 (SCHIRN MAG; the text is an excerpt from: Hilmar Hoffmann, Das Frankfurter Museumsufer , Societäts-Verlag 2010).
- ^ Claus-Jürgen Göpfert: Kunsthalle Frankfurt: Demandt also directs the Schirn . In: fr-online.de . July 29, 2016 ( fr.de [accessed on August 6, 2016]).
- ↑ SCHIRN Kunsthalle Frankfurt . In: Schirn Newsroom . ( schirn.de [accessed June 7, 2019]).
- ↑ Body, Spectacle, Memory, archive in FAZ from August 12, 2011, page 46.
- ↑ Rose-Maria Gropp: Pop nach deutscher Art In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , from November 6, 2014.
- ↑ Sandra Danicke : Naked somersault in heaven. In: Frankfurter Rundschau , October 29, 2015.
- ^ A construction made of steel and light in FAZ of September 23, 2016, p. 38.
- ↑ Big Orchestra: "Artistic works that also have the function of musical instruments" .
- ^ Sandy Nairne: Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners . London 2011, ISBN 978-1-86189-851-7 ; German by Werner Richter: The empty wall. Museum theft. The fall of the two gymnasts . Bern 2012. ISBN 978-3-905799-19-4 .
- ^ Egmont R. Koch and Nina Svensson: Unbelievable! , Press report on the 1994 art theft, Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, November 4, 2005.
- ↑ Fabian Famulok: The entire art-mediating content in the communication of the Schirn is based on storytelling . In: Social Media and Museums II - the digitally expanded narrative space: A guide to getting started with storytelling and developing online-offline projects in museums . January 1, 2016, p. 137–140 , doi : 10.5281 / zenodo.202428 ( zenodo.org [accessed June 15, 2017]).
Coordinates: 50 ° 6 ′ 37 ″ N , 8 ° 41 ′ 1 ″ E