Furnishing the rooms at Roßmarkt with art – a task conceived and carried
out by Deutsche Bank Kunst under the direction of Dr. Ariane Grigoteit and
Friedhelm Hütte – mirrors, together with the history of the Deutsche Bank
Collection itself, a transformation in the search for positions in
contemporary art. While the acquisition of the collection throughout the
eighties chiefly concentrated on works by German-speaking artists who
entertained a dialogue with the works of artists from the respective
"guest countries" of branches worldwide, the question of nationality
receded more and more into the background over the course of the following
years. And while the collection was continuously expanded and augmented
with the works of artists such as
Gerhard Richter,
Jörg Immendorff,
Georg Baselitz, or
Markus Lüpertz, the spectrum of the works hanging at Roßmarkt
demonstrate how the art program has continued to develop.
In tandem
with the increasing computerization and virtualization of the banking
business, global perspectives were sought in the area of art, as well.
Analogous to projects such as the
Moment series, in which Deutsche Bank Art initiates a selected
temporary art event each year to take place in a different major city,
there was a redoubled reaction to the developments in the art centers of
the world, which continue to grow closer and closer together; in the
process, the presence of younger artists from Asia, Africa, and Latin
America has been steadily increasing.
Gerhard Richter, Orchidee, 1998
©Gerhard Richter, Köln; Deutsche Bank
Collection
Since its founding in 1997, the
international exhibition program of the
Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin has been offering testimony to the many ways in
which the bank approaches its art activities. Along with exhibitions of
Classic Modernism and site-specific commissioned works made by renowned
artists such as
James Rosenquist,
Jeff Koons, or
Bill Viola and realized exclusively for the exhibition space at Unter den
Linden, works by the "Artist of the Fiscal Year" have also been shown,
among whom was an artist from the Deutsche Bank Collection whose works
have met with fierce controversy, particularly in the United States.
The African American artist
Kara Walker's large-scale, seemingly historical images are populated by
the characters White America invented to portray deported Africans and
their descendents. As in the works Monument (2001) or Cot'N'Bale
(2001) hanging in the building at Roßmarkt, Walker appropriates the
purportedly nostalgic images of good-natured
"mammies," servile and shrewd "Sambos," fresh
"coons,"
"pickaninnies," and "nigger wenches" that stand for blatant
racist stereotypes.
Kara Walker, Monument, 2001
©Courtesy Brent Sikkema; Deutsche Bank
Collection
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Kara Walker, Cot'N'Bale, 2001
©Courtesy Brent Sikkema; Deutsche Bank Collection
And they're all present in Walker's silhouette dramas: in degrading positions,
locked into excessive scenes of sex and violence – humiliated, humiliating
others, or witnessing humiliation, as observers. We can recognize them
from the crisp contours of their emblematic shapes – the artist can rely
on our collective racist knowledge. Kara Walker belongs to a group of
young African American artists that work with the archive of racist
imagery, and although her works are fundamentally different from Peter
Doig's paintings and draw on another source, they too evoke the impression
of a "falsified history." Walker implements racist memorabilia ,
transcending it into the mythical: she makes use of its emblematic
character, yet frustrates the urge for a final interpretation. In Walker's
works, slavery doesn't appear as a harmless, natural thing – but rather as
a historical grotesque enacted by black and white stereotypes in a
timeless space as two dimensional as a stage set. On the other hand, the
shame we feel in view of this performance is clearly situated in the
present.
"If we only have very little time, then ideally we should
be in a position to say something about the future of the society we are
leaving behind us," the Japanese artist
Miwa Yanagi explains in connection with her photographic work Eternal
City I (1998), which, in the exhibition
Man in the Middle, has been shown all over Europe together with
approximately one hundred other works from the Deutsche Bank Collection.
Along with
Takashi Murakami, Yanagi is one of the most well-known protagonists of the
young Japanese scene; in her works, she reflects the surfaces of a
consumerist society that is becoming more and more streamlined.
Just how subtly Yanagi blurs the boundaries between an idealized staging
and authenticity is demonstrated in her photographic work Yoko & Regine
(2001), which can be seen in the offices at Roßmarkt: with their nearly
supernatural clarity, Yanagi's portraits of women are strikingly similar
to one another and confront traditional Japanese gender roles with a
modernist ambience marked by technology and progress. Like the intimate
embrace of two women on the fringes of a party, the cool arrangement of
hostesses in uniform in a futurist hall of counters simultaneously appears
surreal and hyper-real. If Yanagi's images inquire into traditional
women's roles, then they do this without assuming a clear position.
Miwa Yanagi, Yoko & Regine, 2001
©Almine Rech Gallery, Paris; Deutsche
Bank Collection
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