Thomas Grünfeld –homey

The exhibition was the first institutional retrospective of Thomas Grünfeld, who teaches at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Grünfeld's extraordinarily diverse oeuvre, which was presented here for the first time in an overview, is characterised by strictly separate groups of works.
While Grünfeld is known to most people for his hybrid creatures collaged from animal bodies, his oeuvre, consisting of 16 different work complexes, is fascinating due to its enormous versatility: it moves in areas of tension between painting and sculpture, art and (furniture) design, naturalness and artificiality, functionality and absurdity, the homely and the strange.
By irritating the viewer with hybrid mixtures, subverting expectations and breaking conventions, Grünfeld points to the delicate balance between art and life. The aim of the exhibition was to relate Grünfeld's early passe-partout works, his wall and furniture objects (trays and cushions), his textile and rubber sculptures (skirts and rubbers), the taxidermy (misfits) and eye pictures, photographs (dyes) and felts to each other in different constellations.
In close collaboration with the artist, a scenographic form of presentation was developed that integrated the works into a dialogue on the themes of privacy and domesticity (homey) in an interplay with the atmosphere of the historical rooms.
The exhibition was curated by Fritz Emslander.