All the artists we select for our ‘Art in…’ weekly Rendezvous are creative in their own way. German artist Gregor Schneider works with constructed rooms, and one of his project raised controversy in 2008: the public dying-room.

His work can’t be summed up with this project only but most of his work is about rooms and death. On his Wikipedia page, we can read:

‘I want to show a person, which dies a natural death or just died a natural death. My target is to show the beauty of death […] I want to display a person dying naturally in peace or somebody who has just died […] My aim is to show the beauty of death’. Schneider describes the constructed room in depth. He wants to offer this room in a museum to a dying or a dead person. This could only be realized with the respective agreement of the participant, the relatives and with a nurse or caretaker present on site. He wants to lead death out of the social taboo with this public dying-room and to make it into a positive experience similar to the birth of a human being.

His new show just started at the Hezi Cohen Gallery in Tel Aviv. The exhibition “Pension” brings together two artists: Nahum Tevet and Gregor Schneider.

The name of the exhibition (in the Continental sense of a boardinghouse or small hotel) points to aspects of the experience it wishes to offer. It suggests a concrete place, a structure/institution inside which the activity that takes place is rest, and rest in the present context means being outside the world. Time in the work of each of these artists is a time of death, after things have lost their functionality.

You can check Schneider’s website for more information and work!

Image below: ‘END’ room (2009). Museum of Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, Germany.