Modernisms

Modernisms, an exhibition format in the rooms of piece*unique in Cologne, aims to place singular propo-nents of international contemporary art in dialogue with culturally and historically relevant artifacts and works whose origins lie outside the narrow framework of what is generally understood as “fine art.” This includes architecture, design, literature, and music, as well as more distant areas of culture and knowledge of modernism – an era whose foundations and categories are increasingly up for debate in a world despairing of itself.

By composing such lines of resonance between present and past, Modernisms once more appeals to the virtues of universal thinking. Given this, it should be considered that contemporary art’s inherent dynamics of sensing and asserting its own contexts can yield immense poetic power while also revealing limitations, dissolutions, and dead ends that give new legitimacy to the somewhat anachronistic buzz-word “interdisciplinary.”

The first issue of Modernisms in 2024 correlated letters by Marcel Proust with three groups of works by Croatian artist Dora Budor. Both artists share a preoccupation with forms and layers of memory up to the dissolution of the ego – insomnia, daydream, sudden clarity, euphoria, repetition, depression . . . one’s own life, remembered as foreign in the subjunctive, becomes art – and concurrently a subject of art.

Now, Modernisms 2 brings the American artist Dozie Kanu and Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy into a space-time exchange about the conditions and limits of form, of materiality and functionality, of utilitarianism, of empathy – and ways of life.

“I am extremely ill, I am behind with 800 letters,” Marcel Proust complains in a letter to critic Louis-Martin Chauffier in January 1920, shortly after receiving the Prix Goncourt. This observation, which could very well indicate the current state of overload of the subject, exhausted by mail, social media, and the compulsion to constantly perform, leads back to the early twentieth century and the indirect history of the epochal and convoluted À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) that was embedded in a no less complex network of missives.

It is assumed that Proust could have written up to 40,000 letters, of which at most a quarter have been researched and catalogued to date. In letters to his parents, publisher, and friends, the posthumous publi-cation of which Proust wanted to prevent at all costs, he often addresses the conditions of his illness, and in his last two years of life, it occurs in every letter. He was severely affected by asthma from childhood, but he also used it for all kinds of escapist and manipulative purposes in the service of life and work. Toujours au lit, or “always in bed,” is the title of an important essay by Reiner Speck, in which the place and “sleep” (or lack thereof) are not only at the beginning (and end) of Recherche.

full text (E/D) > download pdf

Between 2015 and 2019 piece*unique presented a selected series of exhibitions with just one singular artwork in the space, always accompanied by a flag of the artist waving outside on the pole

01 MICHAIL PIRGELIS 02 HEIMO ZOBERNIG 03 ALEXANDRA BIRCKEN
04 YVES SCHERER 05 TOM BURR 06 GEORG HEROLD 07 WU TSANG
08 KATE COOPER 09 GREGOR HILDEBRANDT 10 ANNETTE KELM
11 KLARA LIDÉN 12 ROSEMARIE TROCKEL 13 DAVID OSTROWSKI

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