Art for Good - New Life for Exhibitions

Stefan Häfner

1959

Stefan Häfner (*1959) works at the Atelier Goldstein, a workshop primarily for autistic artists in Frankfurt-am-Main. Häfner’s work can be found in the collection of the German Architecture Museum (Deutsches Architekturmuseum). Häfner’s lifetime project is his so-called “Zukunftsstadt” – the city of the future, a complex of three-dimensional residential modules that have grown together to form one single organism. His buildings, made of cardboard and other materials, are connected by elaborate sidewalks, stairways, and catwalks, as well as parking lots, overpasses, and underpasses. The stairwells and courtyards – sometimes open, sometimes covered – are lined with trees, and the public spaces are lit by electric lamps. Rooftops are covered in solar panels, and underground garages await the arrival of vehicles. But there are no vehicles, nor are there books on the bookshelves in the colorfully painted interiors we can explore through the countless windows. In the hallways, climbing vines creep up rounded columns, and the various units are furnished with beds, tables and chairs, even computers… but there are no people. Häfner’s habitats stand proudly on their outspread thin legs, as if to protect the city from a flood, looking out into the unknown through colorfully illuminated windows reminiscent of insect eyes. Are his cities of the future giant lifeboats, a Noah’s ark for a threatened mankind, or are they an apocalyptic vision of what our cities will look like on “The Day After?”

Exhibitions

• Stefan Häfner, Ota Prouza, Marcel Schmitz Crossroads

Audio

• Peter Köner, Deutsches Architekturmuseum, speaks about Stefan Häfner with the curator Ivana Brádková

Ota Prouza

11. 8. 1959

For more than 50 years, Ota Prouza (*1959) has lived in a home for the physically handicapped in the town of Brtníky on the edge of northern Bohemia’s Czech Switzerland National Park. Despite all this time living in a rural setting of villages, forests and nature, he has spent all his life fascinated by the hustle and bustle of the big city, by highways, railways, and everything associated with urban infrastructure. He regularly buys books, calendars and magazines with photographs of the city: skyscrapers, streetcars, trains, and highway interchanges. Although he sometimes explores natural subjects (primarily herds of deer and birds in wildly-branching treetops), his main source of inspiration is clearly civilization, and he captures its pulse in drawings made using pencil, crayons, permanent marker, and pen on sheets of paper that he pastes together into strips that sometimes extend for several meters. His color spectrum depends on his current mood, often also on “whatever is at hand.” He often spends several weeks working on one drawing.

Another of Prouza’s obsessive subjects are hornets, which visit him in his dreams. His fear of them and his fascination with their strange beauty are so strong that these themes sometimes take precedence over urban life and appear in paintings the size of trucks, crowded together in swarms in all their nightmarishness and terrifying beauty.

Ota Prouza is almost always on the move. He does not waste time. In addition to working at the home, he goes on daily walks in the nearby surroundings, several kilometers at a time. In the evening, he settles down to his art and, perhaps influenced by the things he saw on his walk, escapes into grand journeys with no limits on time, possibilities or space, exploring international metropolises no smaller than Prague, New York, or Tokyo. Their skyscrapers, and especially their endless crisscrossing roads and rails with trucks, trains, streetcars, firetrucks and ambulances, are depicted from a bird’s-eye to create a series of images of his never-ending grand “trip.”

Exhibitions

• Stefan Häfner, Ota Prouza, Marcel Schmitz Crossroads

Marcel Schmitz

11. 6. 1966

Marcel Schmitz (*1966) was born in the town of Bastogne in eastern Belgium. He has worked at the La “S” Grand Atelier workshop for mentally handicapped artists in nearby Vielsalm since 2007. One of his defining characteristics is the fact that he was born with Down Syndrome. In terms of subject matter, Schmitz’s art is narrowly focused on the theme of urban architecture. Whether making three-dimensional objects from paper or layered drawings and graphic works, Schmitz is always exploring imaginary cityscapes. In his drawings and paintings, cities are disassembled into individual planes, and the buildings – made up of dozens of windows – overlap one another on the paper like multiple photographic exposures. He freely combines drawing with painting and printmaking, in particular linocut monotypes. Marcel Schmitz creates technical drawings and floorplans, sometimes both at once, and likes to use bird’s-eye view (or rather, plane’s-eye view) perspectives to give his works a highly personal, hallucinatory dimension. Only occasionally do vehicles traverse his uninhabited cities, as if they were trying to give these alienating places a sense of human scale. These concrete elements link Schmitz’s works with their real-life counterparts; otherwise, his creations might feel like sophisticated abstract collages. Schmitz like to turn his cities into three-dimensional models that he shrouds in embroidered fabrics and covers in printed papers. His models, drawings, and paintings transform solid, structured reality into dreamlike perspectives that capture the essence of the city – its monumentality and anonymity, but also its unique poetry – with a remarkable convincingness and intensity.

Exhibitions

• Stefan Häfner, Ota Prouza, Marcel Schmitz Crossroads