Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a new exhibition “The Cloisters Model, Part I: Library,” by the visual artist Antonia Low. The exhibition will be on view in the gallery of Deutsches Haus through January 5, 2018. Please join us for the opening on Friday, December 1, from 6pm to 8pm.
Antonia Low is a Berlin-based visual artist and currently working in New York at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn in an artist residency sponsored by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin.
Antonia Low’s installations, sculptures, and photographs are inspired by the infrastructures that support everyday life and configurate work spaces, storage rooms, and archaeological excavations. In the context of museums and exhibition spaces she turns such casual phenomena into visual objects.
The research project Antonia Low is pursuing during her residency focuses on The Cloisters in Washington Heights. The Cloisters originated from a fascinating idea: original architectural fragments of medieval cloisters and chapels from France and Spain were assembled in Manhattan to form a unique museum complex for medieval art. This new building was created to evoke an atmosphere of the old European monastic life through individual original building elements.
In “The Cloisters Model, Part I: Library” Low now presents the first part of her research, in which she has studied the correspondence between the architect Charles Collens and the curators of the Metropolitan Museum, Joseph Breck and James Joseph Rorimer. In collages and excerpts from their letters, a new version of their vision materializes: the construction of a building that offers the original architectural fragment space to unfold itself, thus shaping the character of the entire structure.
“(…) Her [Antonia Low’s] interest is not so much in the directly political, in the uncovering of institutional hierarchies and power relations; it is more in a spatial reconstruction of the way that the recollections and after-images of spaces become fixed in one’s mind, superimposed on the actual space. In the process, the question is posed whether everything that has left its original location and been placed in an exhibition space or museum becomes a kind of memento of itself. “ (Ludwig Seyfarth, Der verlorene Raum/ Pax und Concordia, wartend, 2014, page 68)
Antonia Low has had solo exhibitions at Palazzo Altemps, Museo Nationale Romano (2016); K21 Kunstsammlung NRW Duesseldorf (2015); Kunstverein Braunschweig (2014); Kunstmuseum Bonn (2014); and most recently at Eigen&Art Lab Berlin (2017) and Gingko Space Beijing (2017).
Antonia Low has received numerous honours, including an artist residency at Casa Baldi, German Academy in Rome (2016), and a working grant from Kunstfonds (2015). She completed extensive researches on spaces within institutions with the support of the Dorothea-Erxleben-Stipendium from the Cultural Ministry of Niedersachsen (2011-2013), the Bonner Kunstpreis (2013) and the Artists in Residency Programme at IMMA – The Irish Museum of Art, Dublin (2014).
Three monographs on her work have been published: Der verlorene Raum/Pax und Concordia, wartend (Kettler Verlag, 2014), Inventar (The Greenbox Verlag, 2012), and Low Deluxe (Argobooks, 2009).