Jean Tinguely. Super Meta Maxi at Museum Kunstpalast

Visiting an exhibition of Jean Tinguely’s art is not a passive experience. Characterised by sound movement and confronting construction it both fills the space it inhabits, and draws the observer in. 

Twenty-five years after the artist’s death, Tinguely’s work are being presented in Germany for the first time. Under the banner, Super Meta Maxi, Museum Kunstpalast’s has more than 90 pieces of TInguely’s work on display in an interactive exhibition of sculptures that you walk around, under and through. And as in the case of his seminal piece – Meta Maxi Maxi Utopia – you have permission to climb up, on and over. 

Jean Tinguely Great Méta-Maxi-Maxi Utopia 1987

Born in Switzerland in 1925, Tinguely began his career as a freelance decorator and artist.  Initially embracing the use of wire to sculpt dynamic pieces, Tinguely’s art expanded to incorporate machines that brought motion and sound to his work. Termed kinetic art, some of these pieces grew to such a size that individual sculptures required an entire room in which to be displayed. 

Jean Tinguely Mengele-Totentanz 1986

Over the course of his career, Tinguely’s exhibitions became known in equal part for the dramatic pieces on display and for the spectacle that surrounded their presentation including a self destructive installation that ultimately went up in flames, and a collaborative work with his wife, sculptor Niki de Phalle, of a giant woman’s body that visitors could walk inside. Both were indicative of Tinguely’s capacity to create colourful, playful pieces that also explored deeper themes of identity, aggression and fear.

Jean Tinguely at the zoo in Krefeld 1987
Photo: AFORK Düsseldorf Leonardo Bezzola

While the Meta Maxi exhibition at Museum Kuntspalast is unlikely to end in flames, controversy or arrest, it is nonetheless a wonderful exhibition that will have you searching out the source of sounds of crashing metal and grinding wheels or following the scent of burning beams down darkened tunnels. Make sure to seek out the superbly presented installation Mengele Totentanz – situated in a room off the one housing Meta Maxi Maxi Utopia. This is a profound and haunting piece that will stay with you long after you leave the exhibition.

Fiona Leonard

Jean Tinguely. Super Meta Maxi

23 April to 14 August 2016

Museum Kunstpalast 

Ehrenhof 4-5

40479 Düsseldorf

Photography Masterclass with Pete Marifoglou

Broken Pavement New York City 1969
@Pete Marifoglou

Next in our series of RhineBuzz Masterclasses will be an afternoon with New York photographer Pete Marifoglou on Monday May 14.

The moment I laid eyes on his work I just knew this was something extraordinarily special.  

As a student of School of Visual Arts NY, Pete took lectures with Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, Duane Michals and Nam June Paik to name but a few. He was invited to take stills at Andy Warhol's Factory. His images are so iconic they almost defy description, we have seen these scenes in so many magazines, but the view is very much his own.

This masterclass will be about looking and considering what we actually see.

Pete Marifoglou
@ Markus Luigs

Today with our phones and digital cameras it is easy to not really see what we photograph - we snap away, then sift through endless images in the hope that we have caught the right one. Pete is an old school photographer, carefully considering his frame and subject before taking that shot. And then, what an image you have! Not a pot-luck photo, but a carefully decided image - a real photograph.

Pete Marifolgou is the winner of two Grimme prizes, one of the most prestigious prizes in German tv.
His work has been described as 'not only rare, but the best emotional I have ever seen for many years' by the director of the Chagall Museum in Nice.
I took his work to the Jewish Museum in New York and could see the look of discovery in the eyes of the curator. 
Other people in the arts world have said, 'Few people are still alive who have experienced the New York at the time that you did. It is a real treasure to see this work and to be able to ask a living person about where it came from, how it came about ' .

' I place you high among the new European photographers' J.C. Lemony, Director of Bibliothéque National Paris in 1979.

Especially for RhineBuzz Pete will take just 4 keen photographers out and about to see his Düsseldorf.  First you will meet, and glimpse his work, then he will take you to shoot in and about town, you will spend the final hour assessing what you have each done.

Cost €88.00
The workshop will take place in the city centre of Düsseldorf, weather permitting

For further details please email caroline@rhinebuzz.com
You can use a digital camera for this workshop

Review - RhineBuzz at the Tonhalle - Sternzeichen 8 with Lucas and Arthur Jussen

Fiona Leonard is new in town.

Originally from Australia, Fiona is an author, scriptwriter and blogger whose wanderlust has taken her across 26 countries on five continents.

I am very happy to welcome Fiona to RhineBuzz, she will be reviewing much of what we do - can't wait :)

Visiting a concert space for the first time is a wonderful treat; a chance to not only experience a performance but the venue as well. Experiencing the Dusseldorf Symphony at the Tonhalle on Monday night was a delight both in terms of venue and performance. While many venues separate the performers and the audience, the Tonhalle is at once both an intimate and a soaring venue. With its impressive domed roof, the Tonhalle, places the audience both in the midst of the orchestra and beneath an arcing sky.

Such a space was a perfect setting for the Dusseldorf Symphony’s performance of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, the recently composed, ‘Symphonic Transformations of a Theme by John Beall’, and the Symphony’s partnership with Dutch piano prodigies, Lucas and Arthur Jussen, performing Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in D Minor by Francis Poulenc.

The evening opened with the premiere of ‘Symphonic Transformations of a Theme by John Beall’; a piece composed in 2014 by American, Kevin Beavers as gift for his composition teacher, John Beall. This is an innovative work that gives as much space to its percussive section as to the more traditional orchestral voices. It is always a pleasure to experience a new piece presented for the first time and when called to the stage at the end of the performance, Beaver’s clear delight at having his composition brought to life was wonderful to see. 

It would be easy to read a symbolic message into the second part of the evening’s performance: a section that began with the orchestra being rearranged to accommodate two young faces on the stage. As the orchestra waited patiently, chairs were removed and two grand pianos moved to centre stage to await the arrival of Dutch piano virtuosos, Lucas Jussen (23) and Arthur Jussen (19). 

With blonde locks and orange socks rounding off their suited ensemble, the brothers looked as if they had got lost en route to a very different type of concert. But their mastery of Poulenc’s Concerto made it clear they were exactly where they were meant to be. The Jussen’s display an unabashed engagement with the music, delighting in their performance and that of their fellow musicians.  The audience’s enthusiastic response to both the Poulenc and the Jussen’s encore of Bizet’s ‘Jeux d’infants  – played on a single piano – left no doubt as to the Jussen’s right to claim centre stage.

The finale of the evening, Dvorák’s ‘New World Symphony’ was a fitting end to a program that felt like something of a reimagining of the musical space.  A symphony that has literally been to the moon and back, Dvorák’s 9^th Symphony speaks to both its European heritage and Dvorák’s experience of the burgeoning New York of the late 1800s. Conductor, Dmitry Liss, an energetic and enigmatic performer in his own right, drew out an elegant collection of solos, particularly from the wind and brass sections, matching them with the strength of the Symphony’s string section, to bring the evening’s journey to a triumphant close.