what is beauty The sculptor Stefan Pietryga says: It comes from within. Functional buildings such as the data center, for example, originally built as an administration building in the late 1960s. No special architecture, just plain squares. Not particularly interesting or inviting from the outside. What pulsates inside is interesting and inviting, says Pietryga: what art is made there, what ideas are produced. The heart of the building is beautiful.
That Stefan Pietryga sees it that way is hardly surprising. Not only is he an artist, he was also one of the first tenants in the creative house founded in 2015 and is active in its strategy group. Now he’s a curator: In the Kunstraum Potsdam he has conceived an exhibition that wants to sound out the urban planning conscience of the state capital. Why is Potsdam being built like this? What of the old can be preserved? Whether data center or Staudenhof: the topic continues to stir up the city like no other.
Succinct title, explosive topic
“Lapidary” is the name of this show, which will herald the Festival Made in Potsdam. The laconic title is in apparent contrast to the explosive nature of the subject. However: That’s what the Romans called short inscriptions carved in stone. “Lapidary” actually means: carved into the stone. Or: belonging to the stone. Her thesis: the stones in the cityscape that we call architecture belong to us, whether we like it or not. They belong preserved. Beyond ideological cargo. So it’s not just about Karl-Heinz Adler, but also about Schinkel and Schadow.
Even if Pietryga’s heart beats for the data center, even if he speaks of “censorship” when it comes to what is less and less represented in Potsdam’s cityscape (GDR modernism): the exhibition links a clear positioning for buildings such as the now demolished old technical college with an enlightening view far beyond the Potsdam horizon. Pietryga, born in 1954, a native of Westphalia and a graduate of the Düsseldorf Art Academy, directs this gaze largely at places in western Germany.
Right in the entrance area of the art space, for example. The star-shaped façade element, which once adorned the old university of applied sciences, greets you on the right hand meter high. Together with other comrades-in-arms, he had transported the pilaster strips on the building to the data center on their own initiative shortly before the demolition, where they were stored for a long time. The technical college had stored the star element itself.
Garbage here, art there?
In the art space, the twelve aluminum elements, designed in the 1970s by an architecture collective led by Wolfgang Kärgel, now dominate an entire wall. To the right, much smaller, is the proof that a very similar design language was en vogue in the West at the same time: a work made of silver-plated aluminum sheeting by the West German artist Heinz Mack from 1975. Both play with serial form, with light and transverse structures. One had to be saved from demolition, the other is considered a recognized work of art. Why? The answer he suggests: ideology. What came from the GDR is automatically worth less.
Another example: Karl-Heinz Adler (1927-2018). Pietryga discovered the Dresden artist when he still had a studio in Essen. At the end of the 1990s, Adler had a large exhibition in the Folkwangmuseum. When Pietryga then moved to Potsdam, he met Adler again: this time as a candidate for demolition. Karl-Heinz Adler and Friedrich Kracht designed the molded stone wall, many meters long, that used to surround the data center. She should go. The wall is set up in the art room, sixty bricks. Refined geometric shapes made of concrete. The way they are presented here, you can no longer avoid them.
In the shop window of the Kunstraum on Nuthestraße, ten meters wide, but: no East Modernism. But a sculptural frieze by Johann Gottfried Schadow, photographed by Michael Lüder. It is the frieze that Schadow made in 1797 for the former Royal Playhouse in Potsdam. In 1966 the theater was demolished. Pietryga rediscovered the frieze: in the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin. On a photo from the 1930s you can read what was once on the Potsdam building: “For the pleasure of the residents”. The lettering should also be legible in the art space. huge.
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