Gregor Schneider

born 1969 in Rheydt, Germany
lives and works in Rheydt

As a teen, Gregor Schneider worked as a coffin bearer, and he often speaks of the big taboo around death and dying. (Recently he became embroiled in controversy after saying he wanted to create a space in a museum in which people could die.) At 16 his own father died and Schneider started on his long-term transformation of his former family home, turning it into a claustrophobic labyrinth of dark corridors, musty crawl spaces and dead ends known as Totes Haus Ur (Dead house ur) 1985–2007. In 1996, he began transporting parts of the house for exhibition around the world, including at the German pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2001, for which he won the Golden Lion. His subsequent architectural modifications of space have gained him plaudits from the art world, notwithstanding comparisons with the likes of Fred West, Josef Fritzl and Marc Dutroux.

Have you ever been back to a childhood home that you lived in, with the intensity of a child, and then come back years later as an adult? If you have, you know how it plays subtle havoc with both mind and body. Are we seeing it? Imagining it? Remembering it as it really was or from the last time we remembered it? What happens with one’s sense of scale? Schneider evokes those profound bodily and psychological reactions to architectural space and domestic environments; and especially to those unnerving elements that seem to escape the conscious mind. He takes as his theme this cold dread of what might be behind a creaky closed door or at the top of a dark staircase.

Trained as a painter, Schneider’s first exhibition in 1985 also showed a fascination with inner spaces: rooms you cannot enter, places that cannot communicate with the outside world. Visitors to his 2004 work, Die Familie Schneider, went alone into first one house and then next door to a second, on an ordinary London residential street. Not only were the two houses identical but, uncannily, they seemed to be peopled with the same man and woman going through the same motions, and in a corner of the bedroom, the same small figure, almost covered by a plastic garbage bag.

In 2005, he proposed Cube Venice, a 15-metre-square tower of scaffolding, shrouded in black fabric, to be placed in the Piazza San Marco opposite the Catholic cathedral. It was designed in tribute to the Ka’aba in Mecca – the Islamic sacred site forbidden to non-worshippers. However, Venice city authorities, supported by Italy's Ministry of Culture, refused to grant the necessary permissions.

In 2007, motivated by photographs of Guantánamo Bay’s Camp V, Schneider made Weisse Folter (White torture). Visitors walked through soundproofed interrogation-rooms and cell-like spaces into existing museum architecture. With interlocking doors and strip lighting, it conjured a place that aimed, as the catalogue phrased it, ‘to destroy a person’s psyche without leaving any demonstrable traces’. It is this work which is most closely aligned with Schneider’s Kaldor project the same year, in which he created 21 beach cells on Sydney’s Bondi Beach.

Read more about Gregor Scheider’s 2007 Kaldor project.

See also Gregor Schneider website.