On the occasion of the reopening of Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Sprüth Magers takes part in SUNDAY OPEN featuring Mies in Mind, an exhibition parcours organized by INDEX Berlin. Held August 20–September 4, 2021, the group exhibition pays tribute to architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Works on view include those by John Bock, Thomas Demand, Thea Djordjadze, Jenny Holzer, Reinhard Mucha, Otto Piene, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Scheibitz.

Thomas Ruff’s series l.m.v.d.r. (since 1999) offers extensive, detailed insights into Mies van der Rohe’s buildings, furniture design, and the dawn of modernism. It finds Ruff focusing on all the buildings Mies van der Rohe created up until his emigration in 1938, including the Barcelona Pavilion and Villa Tugendhat, as well as Haus Esters and Haus Lange. For the works, Ruff worked with various photographic techniques. Unable to photograph some of the buildings himself, the artist used found, archival images that he subsequently digitally altered.

In his painting Portrait (Studie Mies van der Rohe) (2021) Thomas Scheibitz draws a direct reference to an image of the architect himself: “The portrait study shows a mental fragment that is tectonic in nature and could represent a building, a piece of furniture, or a sculpture.”

Daily #08 reveals Thomas Demand’s great interest in architecture and models. The depicted motif goes back to an interior view of a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe building. In 2009 Demand was represented with a comprehensive solo exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie.

Exactly twenty years ago Jenny Holzer created Installation for the Neue Nationalgalerie, 2001. Along the ceiling of the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe building, she mounted thirteen LED strips, each 49 meters long.

“I found the work [of Jenny Holzer] at the […] kinetic level, fascinating and what it did to the building was extraordinary. To see strikes running through the building did a number of things quite shockingly; some of which were emphasizing Mies’s idea: the sort of endlessness. And Jenny Holzers work plays with that even more. So, it doubles, triples the effect of space running inside and outside. So all of a sudden the static roof which emphasizes this continuity […] is dynamic.”
–David Chipperfield