Gregor Schneider - Kindergarten

At the age of 16, Schneider went to live alone in a family house on Unterheydener Street in his native Rheydt, a city close to Cologne. The house, located at number 12, became a laboratory where Schneider could experiment with his artistic production, using the space and its construction.

From that time, and for more than twenty years, Schneider dedicated himself to rebuilding, remaking and transforming the rooms of the house––divisions, walls, holes and new windows, rooms within rooms––to the point where it became impossible to recognize the original structure of the building. A repetition of elements, construction of new ones, reconstructed duplicate rooms, holes and tunnels––Schneider used these to create the piece, Haus u r [House u r] (1985-to present), that became an ongoing experiment in construction and transformation, where the intervened space took on new presences and meanings. In 2001, Schneider was invited to represent Germany at the Venice Biennial. So he decided to transform Haus u r into Totes Haus u r [Dead House u r] (2001), and literally dismantled the rooms of his house in Rheydt to move them to Venice, a project for which he was awarded the Golden Lion.

Since then, and playing with reality and fiction, he has recreated and modified the initial rooms, along with more recent ones, and transported them to various galleries and museums, like the ones presented in the Kindergarten show at MUAC. Rooms at once inhabited and uninhabited, Schneider's constructions are stripped of their attire and their context, becoming non-places, transitory and indeterminate spaces.