New Daimler Art Collection Commissioned Artworks – Renate Wiehager in Dialog with Hartmut Böhm and Andreas Schmid

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As a key part of the collection’s concept, the Daimler Art Collection regularly commissions artworks from selected artists.

Last year, in a continuation of his new “table piece” artwork group, Hartmut Böhm began to create the seven-meter-long spatial sculpture “or-or” (2016), which is composed of seven table elements. The seemingly severely formal arrangement of found objects from his studio and from art history reflects diverse developments in Böhm’s work since 1960, side-by-side with developments in art over the same period. What are the dialogic relationships between the objects, and how do they retrospectively reflect the genesis of the artist’s work and of his understanding of art? What are the roles played by serial formation, proportion, deconstruction, and scale? And, finally, what place does this artwork group occupy in the oeuvre of Hartmut Böhm?

Andreas Schmid’s light stelae installation “Lichtungen-Berlin [Clearings-Berlin]” reflects the artist’s temporary and situation-based working methods. In line with this, he has entirely rethought and adapted the artwork acquired in 2009, for the current exhibition “Adolf Fleischmann Retrospective” at the Daimler Contemporary. With the aid of a programmed computer control system, the artist composes a variety of sequences and intensities for the twenty-one colored fluorescent tubes. The resulting slowly-changing space-light figure creates an architectonic transitional area and dialogue space with Fleischmann’s abstract paintings, and accentuates Fleischmann’s key painterly goal: to achieve vibration and intimacy of color. What is the aesthetic concept behind the artwork? What is the relationship between the light sequences and the exterior and interior perception?