ELEMENTAL PARTS
BASIC BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE SPRENGEL MUSEUM HANNOVER AND ITS ART
13.4.19 TO 31.12.21
EXTENSION
For its 40th anniversary, the Sprengel Museum Hannover is presenting the ELEMENTARTEILE exhibition in the extension building. What are the core components of the institution? What is art, and what is art made of, what does it relate to, and what is it about? In ten themed rooms, the Sprengel Museum Hannover as an institution and its collection asks itself about such fundamental questions.
What role does color play as one of the basic building blocks in art, what materials do artists use, and what form and design principles do they use? Which reality (s) do works between conceptual art, abstraction and figuration relate to? Which contents play a role, which stories are told, how is history reflected in art? ELEMENTARTEILE brings together more than 150 works from the 20th century and contemporary art and shows an impressively broad spectrum of possibilities of expression in painting, sculpture, graphics, photography and film by artists such as Max Beckmann, Louise Bourgeois, Grethe Jürgens, Niki de Saint Phalle, Pablo Picasso and Gerhard Richter.
THE SPRENGEL MUSEUM HANNOVER
On his 70th birthday, April 17th, 1969, Bernhard Sprengel announced that he and his wife Margrit wanted to donate the joint collection to the state capital Hanover. 10 years later, the “Art Museum Hannover with Sprengel Collection” (renamed “Sprengel Museum Hannover” in 1984) was opened, in 1992 a second construction phase and in 2015 an extension was added.
The Sprengel Museum Hannover houses all the holdings from the collections of the state capital Hannover, the state of Lower Saxony and the Sprengel collection, which were created after 1900. There are also holdings from the Kurt and Ernst Schwitters Foundation, the Kurt Schwitters Archive, the Lower Saxony Sparkasse Foundation, the Rudolf Jahns Foundation, the Bernhard Sprengel and Friends Foundation, the Hannover Re Foundation, the Fritz Behrens Foundation and various other foundations on permanent loan.
Curators: Reinhard Spieler and Stella Jaeger