DIE KUNST DER LETZTEN DREIßIG JAHRE: HERMANN PITZ

On Friday, September 10, 2010, Galerie Thomas Schulte will open a presentation of two installations by Hermann Pitz. The opening from 7 to 9 pm will take place as part of the evening of openings held by the newly founded Berlin Gallery District. The artist will be present.

Hermann Pitz’s work has been one of the most important and influential contributions to conceptual art in Germany in the past 30 years. Working under the label Büro Berlin with Fritz Rahmann and Raimund Kummer, Hermann Pitz developed new artistic principles of creation and exhibition conceptions in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Still legendary today is the exhibition series Räume, which was held in one of Berlin’s empty factories located on Lützowstraße.

The work of Hermann Pitz can be situated within the tradition of constant research that is characteristic of the European avant-garde, focusing its analysis on the essence of contemporary art and the social function of the artist. It refuses the usual classification, but can in the broadest sense be considered sculpture or installation.

Hermann Pitz works with found objects and personal bits of memory. At the same time, his assemblages and installations always refer back to the overall body of work and its history. The works often remain open for later changes or even their integration in other works. 

The title of the exhibition at Galerie Thomas Schulte Die Kunst der letzten dreißig Jahre (The Art of the Last Thirty Years) refers to a lecture on art history held by Max Sauerlandt at Hamburg’s university in 1933. Pitz quotes the following: “For what is the present? Not now, yesterday, or the day before. For each individual person the present is rather in the time span of his eternal occurrences. In this sense, each of us has his own present, colored by the extent and nature of his place of living and the way he leads his life. For this reason, it is most difficult to find a common understanding even about what would seem to be the most obvious question. For just as each of us lives in his natural present, we also each speak our own language, only understandable to the individual alone.”