The garden at St. Agnes has been completely renovated, and will be open to the public for the first time, hosting ‘Gartenschau’ (Garden Show in German), focusing on the medium of sculpture. What kind of experience can guests expect for this?
The whole layout is planned like this: If you’re upstairs in the gallery, you can walk down the staircase and into the garden, and then walk through the garden into the other exhibition space, and vice versa. So that’s the plan. We’ll have to see – it will be attended by someone from the front desk, as we have to give the plants some time to settle down and stabilize as it’s a fragile environment. There are different layers to the garden – it’s multi-layered, which also refers to the building. We tried to give each sculpture its own space. We have Elmgreen & Dragset, Katharina Grosse, Jeppe Hein, Camille Henrot, Michael Sailstorfer, Tatiana Trouvé, Erwin Wurm and David Zink Yi on show.
Quite the line-up! Can you talk us through the process for designing the artistic program for the gallery?
My strategy was always to have the best artists in their respective disciplines, like Annette Kelm – she stands in line with other artists who work in a similar sphere, but I think she’s the most relevant. The same goes for Katharina Grosse in painting. So each artist stands for him or herself, but at the same time, together with the other artists in the program, who together build a strong group together. Some galleries try to focus on a school. They have a group of certain movements, say, Leipzig painters. I always try to have the most relevant representative from each field, so to speak.
A good example of how we start working with artists is perhaps Erwin Wurm, our newest addition to the gallery. He has a fantastic show on at the moment at the Berlinische Galerie. He’s going to represent Austria for this year’s Venice Biennale. I’ve been following his work for quite some time now, and always thought about doing something with him. Then I visited him four years ago in his studio outside Vienna. We started a dialogue, and I went to see a couple of exhibitions, and then I went to see his show at Berlinische Galerie, was finally convinced. He was still willing to show with us, so we agreed that he’d join us, and be represented by us. We’re going to show his cucumbers for the first time in our garden show. To get him on board, it took – until the final moment – maybe five years. At the end it went very quickly, but only because we’d evened out the ground before.
