Exhibitions 2012

The exhibition Olympia: Myth – Cult – Games in Antiquity was devoted to the ancient Olympia shrine and its cult and to the contests held there that are revived every four years in the modern Olympic Games. Olympia was an initiative of the Greek Cultural Foundation and the Greek Ministry of Culture. The German Archaeological Institute and the Martin-Gropius-Bau are partners of the project. Over 500 valuable loans from Greece were on display. Important loans from the Vatican, Paris, Rome, Dresden and Munich supplemented the grand panorama.

As of March 2011, the photographer Regina Schmeken accompanies the national German football team to international matches and to the 2012 European Championship in Poland and the Ukraine. The exhibition Among players depicts the men's encounter and play with the ball like a choreographed scene - viewed from a particular perspective. The exhibited photographs were taken between March 2011 and June 2012.

The exhibition Dennis Hopper – The Lost Album showed a spectacular portfolio of over four hundred vintage photographs taken by Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) in the 1960s. Tucked away in five crates and forgotten, they were discovered after his death. There can be no doubt that these works are those personally selected by Hopper from the wealth of shots he took between 1961 and 1967 for the first major exhibition of his photography. The pictures themselves document how the works were installed in the Fort Worth Art Center Museum, Texas, in 1969 by himself and Henry T. Hopkins, the museum’s director at the time. None of these works had been displayed in Europe before.

On the occasion of the Year of Russia in Germany the Martin-Gropius-Bau presented a video trilogy which the artists’ group AES+F from Moscow started in the year 2005 and completed in 2011. The work consists of the three titles: The Last Riot (2005/2007), The Feast of Trimalchio (2009) and Allegoria Sacra [Sacred Allegory] (2011). The work was presented as a trilogy for the first time in Germany.

Diane Arbus (New York, 1923–1971) revolutionized the art she practiced. Her bold subject matter and photographic approach produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity. Her gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar, and for uncovering the familiar within the exotic, enlarges our understanding of ourselves.The Martin-Gropius-Bau presented a selection of two hundred photographs that afford an opportunity to explore the origins and aspirations in the photography of Diane Arbus. The exhibition showed all of the artist’s iconic photographs as well as many that have never before been publicly exhibited.

Soviet Art and Architecture 1915–1935. With photographs by Richard Pare

The Exhibition Architects of Revolution shed light on an area of the Soviet avant-garde that has remained relatively unknown in Europe and beyond: architecture. Even in Russia and the other successor states of the former Soviet Union the names of most of the architects have been largely forgotten. Their structures have not become part of the collective cultural memory to the extent that the “New Building” movement in the West has.

The newspaper has served as material and subject matter for art since the mid-19th Century. Artists deal with this medium in many ways, whether in its function as an instrument of information or of manipulation. The motivations and meanings behind the use of the medium are always different. The exhibition ARTandPRESS showed over 50 artistic positions on this issue, by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Ai Weiwei, Julian Schnabel, William Kentridge, Richard Prince, Annette Messager and Rirkrit Tiravanija among others.

The exhibition project Pacific Standard Time – Art in Los Angeles, 1950-1980 traced the development of the Los Angeles art scene during the post-war period, when the city on the Pacific hosted an impressively varied and versatile art scene, thus proving that it was more than Hollywood and a sprawling metropolis in the land of sunshine and palm trees. Pacific Standard Time featured such internationally esteemed artists as John Baldessari, David Hockney, Edward Kienholz or Ed Ruscha as well as protagonists that are yet to be discovered like the abstract painters Helen Lundeberg and Karl Benjamin, the ceramicists Ken Price and John Mason, and sculptors such as De Wain Valentine.