Schmela Gallery

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Alfred Schmela in front of his first gallery in Düsseldorf's old town, 1961

The Schmela Gallery in Düsseldorf was a gallery founded by the art dealer Alfred Schmela in 1957. It is considered to be one of the most important and first private art galleries of the post-war period in the Federal Republic of Germany. The gallery house opened in 1971, currently called Schmela-Haus , has served the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection as a third location for exhibitions since November 2009 .

The first and second gallery

The gallery was opened on May 31, 1957 by Alfred Schmela in a 9 × 3 meter shop at Hunsrückstrasse 16-18 in Düsseldorf's old town with the exhibition Proportions monochromes , in which the then unknown painter Yves Klein for the first time in Germany showed his monochrome pictures. The opening speech was given by Pierre Restany . The one-month exhibition at Schmela was successful for Klein in another respect: In addition to a great response in the press, he also got to know the artists of the newly founded ZERO group. And on the opening day he applied for the artistic design of the Gelsenkirchen Music Theater .

On July 5, 1961, she presented the ZERO event ZERO. Edition, exposition, demonstration that was connected to a ZERO festival in Düsseldorf's old town. In the gallery, which existed until December 1966, found the 38 works by Joseph Beuys comprehensive exhibition ... any train ... the first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery instead. On the opening day, November 26, 1965, Beuys performed the action on how to explain the pictures to the dead rabbit . From January 1967 to spring 1971, the gallery work took place in the rooms of the Schmela family's apartment at Luegplatz 3 on Luegallee in Düsseldorf- Oberkassel . Since some of the museum directors, artists, collectors, critics or gallery owners like to stay longer, home-style cooking was served at lunchtime and a stew with a sheet of yeast cake was served on Saturdays. "The most human gallery in the world" once remarked a curator of the Tate Gallery .

The gallery house from 1971

Schmela House

In September 1971 the gallery moved into a residential and gallery house designed by the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck for Alfred Schmela at Mutter-Ey-Strasse 3 in Düsseldorf, which was opened on September 17, 1971 with an exhibition of the installation Barraque D'Dull Odde by Joseph Beuys was opened. The installation was sold by the gallery to the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld during the exhibition , where it can still be seen today. At the same time as the gallery house, exhibitions took place in Lantz'schen Park in Düsseldorf- Lohausen and, for a short time, in the Lantz'schen Villa, where the family had lived since October 1975. After Schmela's death in 1980, his wife Monika Schmela and daughter Ulrike Schmela-Brüning took over the gallery. After the mother's death, the daughter sold the building to the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 2008 and closed the gallery to move to Berlin.

Description of the building

What is known today as the Schmela-Haus is the building in Düsseldorf's old town that was characterized as Galerie Schmela until 2009 and has been a listed building since 1996 . It was built from 1967 to 1971 by Aldo van Eyck in the style of structuralism and cost around 500,000 DM with a total area of ​​378 m². When it opened in 1971, it was also the first gallery building in Germany to be built for this purpose. Since November 11, 2009, the building has been the third location of the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection in Düsseldorf alongside the K 20 and K 21 ; it is used for art exhibitions and symposia .

The outer shell of the multi-layered masonry of the facade was built from prefabricated concrete bricks. The concrete lintels remained visible over the openings. The building has five floors, two underground and three above ground. In the original design, the architect envisaged a glass cylinder as a connection in the middle of the building, but this was changed by the owner Schmela in favor of larger living space. In 1995 the building was rebuilt. The architect Günter Zamp Kelp closed the original passage and converted it into a business and exhibition space.

With its nested interiors made of bare pumice concrete, concrete ceilings and marble floors, also equipped with a cozy seating area, the gallery building deviated noticeably from the usual white cube exhibition rooms after its opening .

Gallery activity

Alfred Schmela exhibited works by Jean Tinguely , Lucio Fontana , Arman , Robert Filliou , Gordon Matta-Clark , artists, many of whom were on view in Germany for the first time. His program also included the first series of German post-war art: Joseph Beuys , Norbert Kricke , Konrad Klapheck , Gerhard Richter , the ZERO artists, Hans Haacke and Jörg Immendorff . He was also the first to exhibit in Germany, if not in Europe, the Americans Sam Francis , Robert Indiana , Morris Louis , Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Morris , Kenneth Noland , George Segal and Richard Tuttle .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Katja Zelljadt: The Getty Research Journal , Edition 1, Getty Publications, 2009 ISBN 978-0-89236-970-6 , p. 204, note 10
  2. ^ Ingrid Pfeiffer, Carla Orthen: Biography . In: Oliver Berggruen, Max Hollein, Ingrid Pfeiffer (Eds.): Yves Klein , Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt am Main, p. 218 f.
  3. ^ Karl Ruhrberg (Ed.): Alfred Schmela. Gallery owner · Wegbereiter der Avantgarde , Cologne 1996, p. 53 f.
  4. ↑ 3sat article How to explain the pictures to the dead rabbit on YouTube , accessed on May 11, 2011
  5. ^ A b Karl Ruhrberg (Ed.): Alfred Schmela. Gallery owner · pioneer of the avant-garde . Wienand, Cologne 1996, p. 24
  6. ^ Karl Ruhrberg (Ed.): Alfred Schmela. Gallery owner · Wegbereiter der Avantgarde , Cologne 1996, p. 188
  7. ^ Karl Ruhrberg (Ed.): Alfred Schmela. Gallery owner · pioneer of the avant-garde . Wienand, Cologne 1996, p. 206
  8. ↑ He listened to his artists In: faz.net of September 17, 2007
  9. ↑ a b Swantje Karich: End of an Era and New Beginning In: faz.net of October 28, 2008
  10. ↑ a b Schmela house at artipool
  11. ^ Index magazine , accessed on February 2, 2011
  12. ^ New meeting point for art lovers in Westdeutsche Zeitung from November 10, 2009
  13. ^ Art collection NRW: history
  14. ↑ Beuys in Düsseldorf: The “parallel processes” were started in: Der Standard from September 13, 2010
  15. ↑ The Beuys flat share in Die Welt compact from March 17, 2010
  16. ^ Ulrich Brinkmann: Museums and exhibition buildings - Düsseldorf: Das Schmela-Haus - The third venue ( Memento from March 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) in: Bauwelt from August 6, 2010, pp. 24–31
  17. ^ Antonia Lotz: Aldo van Eyck and the home factor , architecture magazine Bauwelt , No. 25/2011
  18. ^ Karl Ruhrberg (Ed.): Alfred Schmela. Gallery owner · pioneer of the avant-garde . Wienand, Cologne 1996, blurb

Coordinates: 51 ° 13 ′ 37.6 ″  N , 6 ° 46 ′ 32.5 ″  E