The dream of a new beginning for culture
The KölnSkulptur series is a biennial exhibit, an open-air museum for contemporary sculpture, founded in 1997 through the private initiative of collectors Michael and Eleonore Stoffel. The Skulpturenpark Köln Foundation has continued to uphold the original idea of the Stoffel family to secure the future of the park and to preserve it as a place of artistic dialogue and reflection.
Every two years the Foundation appoints an independent curator. Their different conceptions of contemporary outdoor sculpture continuously change the park’s appearance. New sculptures from national and international artists are exhibited alongside well-established works of art. Under the title of La Fin de Babylon. Mich wundert, dass ich so fröhlich bin! this edition, which commemorates the 20th anniversary of the park, has been curated by Chus Martínez.
“Do you remember the 'Tales of One Thousand and One Nights'? When Antoine Galland translated them at the beginning of the eighteenth century they transformed the imagination of the time.” As Martinez expressed, the title La Fin de Babylone relates to the dream of a new beginning for culture and therefore for society. And the second part of the title: Mich wundert, dass ich so fröhlich bin!, “full of healthy humour, relates not to us, but to the effort art makes to be great every time it happens.”
The Curator explains “It would not be accurate to say that the commissioned works for this edition are like those tales, but the park is the perfect grounds to be inhabited by the forces of fiction. (…) Skulpturenpark Köln is a continuous voice that recalls the possibilities we still have to survive, and it does so with art. (…) The artworks are not magic, though they all share the idea that sensation is what fuels a new imagination of the world we live in. They all want to animate the nonhuman—nature, metal, wood, earth—and bear witness to a common territory between us and animals, plants and geological life. The exercise of merging the realms of the human and the non-human is not a metaphorical one. It is oriented towards a reflection on the inhuman, on cruelty and all the means we have to avoid it.”
The artists selected for this year’s edition are Andrea Büttner, Claudia Comte, Jan Kiefer, Eduardo Navarro, Solange Pessoa, Lin May Saeed, Teresa Solar and Pedro Wirz.
The park, which is about 35,000 square meters in size, is open all year round and admission is free. Every first Sunday of the month at 3 p.m., the Foundation provides a guided tour for the public.
KÖLNSKULPTUR 9
La Fin de Babylone - Mich wundert, dass ich so fröhlich bin!
Until 06.2019
Skulpturenpark Köln
Cologne, Germany
www.skulpturenparkkoeln.de
