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CURRENT
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EDITION CAMERA AUSTRIA
CAMERA AUSTRIA AWARD
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68 | 1999
 € 0.-
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YILMAZ DZIEWIOR Bottomless. On Gregor Schneider Even in the first few minutes of my meeting with Mrs Reuen, the old lady seemed to me to be rather strange. I met her on the way to see Gregor Schneider, or to be more precise, just as I was ringing at his door. Hannelore Reuen, as her full name was, opened the door and asked me into the narrow hallway of the three-storey apartment house in Unterheydener Straße in the small Lower Rhine town of Rheydt. She said she didn't think, that Mr Schneider was at home, but I was welcome to wait in her flat for the young man – as she referred to Schneider. Quite suddenly she told me, that she had known him since he was sixteen years old. As an adolescent, just going through puberty (as she put it with a pinched, slightly disgusted expression), he had moved into the house, that she had been living in for many years. She said she remembered very well, that it had been shortly after the death of her husband when Schneider had turned up at the house at the edge of the Lower Rhine lead works. The lead works, including the house, she said, had already belonged to his parents who had had trouble finding any new tenants owing to the fact that the house was situated right next to the lead works. To begin with the young man had only dropped by to paint his large-format pictures. He had painted young girls, she said, always completely naked, it had always reminded her of a picture by Edvard Munch, that she had seen at the National Gallery in Oslo in her honeymoon. She had noticed the unpleasant combination of death and sexuality, not unusual in the work of the Norwegian painter, in Schneider's early pictures, too. After some time, the young man had moved in proper, albeit without actually ever having arrived with a furniture van or the like. More and more often, he had taken to not leaving the house for days on end. At other times he would cart large lead panels, vast amounts of building debris, wood and other materials into the house. Text feature in Camera Austria 68/1999, Page 19 - 28. |
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