Gabriele Obermaier
Body space material
16.06. – 29.07.2018

She has already placed a house in the water or a building made of felt in front of one made of stone. She has placed a wrapped “gift” in front of children’s doors or poured out stars for schoolchildren. We are talking about the artist Gabriele Obermaier. The house in the water stands distorted in perspective in an overflow basin in Dorfen, in Upper Bavaria, where it is occasionally flooded. The sculpture “Soft House” is a scaled-down, fabric replica, but then cast in aluminum, of the respectable building of the Federal Social Court in Kassel. The gift, in turn, is fittingly located in front of a children’s home in Munich and the “Sternenschütte” in the European School, also in Munich. These are just four examples of art-in-architecture competitions in which the artist Gabriele Obermaier has been successful since 2003. And now Bremerhaven follows. In December, she won the art-in-architecture competition for the new building of the Thünen Institutes of Sea Fisheries and Fisheries Ecology out of almost 300 submissions. Her design UWO_1-8 is to be realized over the summer of 2018.

The Kunstverein Bremerhaven von 1886 is delighted to have secured the artist for an exhibition at the Kunsthalle in the near future. This is the Munich-based artist’s first exhibition in northern Germany and also her first solo exhibition. This is remarkable because Gabriele Obermaier has been exhibiting her objects and photographic works in numerous exhibitions since the mid-1990s and has repeatedly been successful in art-in-building competitions. The fact that Gabriele Obermaier has appeared less frequently as an individual artist is due to the fact that she has mostly participated in exhibitions with the artist collective “Department für öffentliche Erscheinungen” together with Peter Boerboom, Carola Vogt and Silke Witzsch †.

Works by the department are currently on display at the Rathausgalerie Kunsthalle München. Another exhibition by Gabriele Obermaier will follow in June at the Kunstverein Ebersberg. Her exhibition calendar is therefore well filled.

In the group exhibitions, projects and interventions of the Department for Public Appearances, Gabriele Obermaier’s mostly sculptural contributions have generally been characterized by the three parameters of materiality, site or spatial reference and form, as they are also visible in her art-in-architecture contributions and from which the title of the current exhibition BODY_SPACE_MATERIAL at the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven is derived. Sociological, communicative and participatory aspects were also added to the department’s actions and interventions. In the exhibition in Bremerhaven, Gabriele Obermaier is showing new and site-specific works.

Curated by Dr. Kai Kähler.