Galerie Thomas Zander is pleased to open this year’s exhibition program with new works by Molly Springfield and Andrea Geyer. In their media-reflexive works both artists explore the pictorial interpretation of time, trace and memory. While Molly Springfield’s medium is drawing, Andrea Geyer uses photography and video. 

On the Second Floor, three work groups by Andrea Geyer (b. 1971, lives and works in New York City) are on view, which were created during a research fellowship and commission at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Past Strangers (2014) is a series of photographs taken at the Museum of Modern Art’s Painting and Sculpture Conservation Lab. The photographs depict various artworks from the museum’s collections while they were in the lab for inspection. By taking the artworks out of their auratic, historically determined exhibition space, Geyer’s photographs open up new perspectives that show the world-famous works uncovered, without frame or pedestal, primarily emphasizing their materiality and visual language. Geyer thus highlights the genuinely artistic attributes of the works and reveals the extent to which the viewer usually relies on the stylized cultural or contextual meaning predetermined by the historicization of the works. Some of the photographs are framed under engraved glass. This intervention lends an additional sensibility to the perception of the represented artworks and offers the viewer a new and unfamiliar experience.


Three Chants Modern and Indelible (Armory Show) investigate the history of women in the establishment of modernism in America. In 50 ink drawings Indelible lists the names of the 50 women who participated in the famous first Armory Show of 1913. This work sets a powerful monument to the women among the 300 artists presented at the show. In Three Chants Modern, too, important female figures of the 1920s and 1930s are at the centre of a successful network engaged in the areas of culture, society and politics. They are still known today for their involvement in the foundation of major museums, including Abby Rockefeller, Lillie Bliss and Mary Sullivan (MoMA), Gertrude Vanderbilt (Whitney Museum) and Katherine Dreier (Société Anonyme). Andrea Geyer’s two-channel video installation reflects on these relationships in the context of the contemporary museum. Her work also recurs to well known and celebrated works by other artists, which function as historical blueprints in the video that sharpen the perception of the present. For this film, the artist expands her oeuvre to incorporate dance and music for the first time. In these three most recent work groups Geyer continues her ongoing investigation of time, history and the manifestation of a complex present.


Andrea Geyer’s works are collected by major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Whitney Museum, and have been shown in numerous acclaimed exhibitions. In 2007 she already received wide recognition for her participation in documenta 12.