Presentation of the new edition:
The exhibition at EDITION BLOCK and KIF – KUNST IM FENSTER brings together works by Pravdoliub Ivanov (born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1964) from the past three decades. His installation Vehicles Dream, created in New York in 1998, takes the centre stage. The city that ‘never sleeps’ was the setting for Ivanov’s photographs of people sleeping in subway cars, exhausted by the rhythm of the city that they themselves help to maintain. By mounting the images on small wheels scattered throughout the space, he allowed visitors to rearrange them. Moving around in this way, the portraits appear as a symbol of collective exhaustion. The social metaphor of these alienated and isolated figures, created more than 25 years ago, has gained unexpected political relevance today, visible in their silent paralysis and metaphysical helplessness.
As part of a renewed focus on Vehicles Dream a new edition based on the original photographs has been published this year by Edition Block. The images of the sleeping figures are arranged in varying configurations in different sets of five wheels each. The edition of 20 is being shown for the first time at KIF – Kunst im Fenster.

The exhibition brings together works by Pravdoliub Ivanov (born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1964) from the past three decades. His installation Vehicles Dream, created in New York in 1998, takes the centre stage. The city that ‘never sleeps’ was the setting for Ivanov’s photographs of people sleeping in subway cars, exhausted by the rhythm of the city that they themselves help to maintain. By mounting the images on small wheels scattered throughout the space, he allowed visitors to rearrange them. Moving around in this way, the portraits appear as a symbol of collective exhaustion. The social metaphor of these alienated and isolated figures, created more than 25 years ago, has gained unexpected political relevance today, visible in their silent paralysis and metaphysical helplessness.
In addition to the work Vehicles Dream, the artist’s objects and drawings explore the interplay between everyday life, perception and imagination. With subtle, often humorous interventions, seemingly familiar things are called into question.
Pravdoliub Ivanov lives and works in Sofia. He studied at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia and, together with Ivan Moudov and Stefan Nikolaev, represented Bulgaria at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Previously, he participated in the 4th Istanbul Biennale (1995), Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana (2003) and the 4th Berlin Biennale (2006). His works have also been shown in important overview exhibitions such as In den Schluchten des Balkan (2003) at the Fridericianum in Kassel and Blut & Honig – Zukunft ist am Balkan (2003) at the Essl Collection in Klosterneuburg. His works can be found in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Neues Museum in Nuremberg, among others.

With her site-specific installation Sol, Sunah Choi transforms the KIF window into a space of glass and light. Eight seamlessly arranged glass panels fit perfectly into the space behind the window and fill its floor plan. They are both a ‘floor’ (French: sol) and a large-format image.
In her work, Sunah Choi deals with space, its perception and its cultural coding. She draws on the vocabulary of architecture as well as that of painting and sculpture. Of particular interest are those elements that structure or infuse the space, such as windows, frames or grids. In this way, Sol builds on the Edition Karo conceived for Edition Block in 2020.
The installation at KIF is complemented by a framed stained glass window from the Vitres series. It transforms the window motif into a transparent image carrier, thus deepening the dialogue between interior and exterior space.

In the 1950s, conductor Franz Marszalek presented ‘rare, forgotten, perhaps today unique treasures’ – as he himself said in his first broadcast – once a week in the radio programme Herr Sanders öffnet seinen Schallplattenschrank (Mr. Sanders opens his record cabinet), sharing historical records from his archive with his audience. Among the listeners was the young René Block, who followed the format with great enthusiasm at the time. Just like Franz Marszalek once did, Block (who would have liked to have become a conductor) is now opening up his archive himself and providing insights into his work as a gallery owner and curator over the past 60 years.
The exhibition shows a selection of materials, publications and ephemera such as exhibition posters and invitation cards from various stages in Block’s career.
The current exhibition also includes a remarkable series of personal portraits of artists whom René Block occasionally photographed – a reflection of intensive collaborations and close friendships.

Endre Tót is one of the most important artists of conceptual art and the mail art movement. His actions, texts, and photographic works are characterized by subversive wordplay and ironic exaggerations that undermine the logic of political and artistic systems. From the beginning of his artistic career, Tót focused on radical reductions: zeros, missing characters, and ironic statements became his trademark and served as a subtle form of resistance against ideological appropriation.
Tót originally began as a painter and experimented with informal art as well as pop and minimal art influences in the 1960s. In the early 1970s, he turned away from painting and developed his conceptual series of works such as My Unpainted Canvases and TÓTalJOYS, which deal with absence, nothingness, and irony.
His mail art activities helped him overcome artistic isolation in Hungary and connect with the international Fluxus movement.
In 1978, he came to West Berlin on a DAAD scholarship, subsequently emigrated to Germany, and thus finally escaped state censorship in Hungary. In 1979, René Block exhibited his work for the first time in his gallery in Berlin – the beginning of a connection that continues to this day. After the political change in Hungary, his works were exhibited in international museums, including the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel. In recent years, he continued his performance demonstrations, focusing on his central concepts of absence and joy.
We are pleased to present two works by the artist, specially created for this occasion, in the exhibition WHICH IS THE RIGHT DIRECTION? In addition to the eponymous work WHICH IS THE RIGHT DIRECTION?, Endre Tót has also re-created his 1972 work LOVE/HATE. Originally painted in oil on wood, it is now shown as a silkscreen print on wood in the outdoor area of the KIF. Accompanying this, the signed special edition LOVE/HATE (1972/2025) has also been created using the screen printing process.

A glance at the bookshelf reveals them immediately: the grand Complete Works, monumental editions that bundle the work of an author, a literary legacy in bound form. They promise completeness and a completed work. But what if they contain nothing?
Barbara Bloom plays with this expectation in her work The Complete Works of Barbara Bloom (1990): 38 volumes bound in black linen are carefully arranged on a shelf. The mottoes embossed in gold on the spines in Latin, English, French and German function as book titles of imaginary literary or philosophical works and open up various fields of association. The silhouette of Bloom’s profile and her surname on the spines identify the artist as the author of these collected works. But the pages remain blank. They invite you to fill the individual works with your own thoughts. The Complete Works of Barbara Bloom thus becomes a library of the imagination – in the spirit of Arthur Køpcke’s slogan “fill with own imagination”.
Barbara Bloom is best known for her precise and witty installations in which she restages, reproduces or appropriates objects and images. Her works question how meaning is created, how collections shape knowledge and how art negotiates ownership claims. She has had solo exhibitions at the Kunsthal Aarhus, MoMA New York, Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, ZKM Karlsruhe and the Serpentine Gallery London, among others. Her works are represented in important collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Art Institute of Chicago. Barbara Bloom lives and works in New York.
In our shop window KIF – KUNST IM FENSTER in Schaperstraße, we will be showing The Complete Works of Barbara Bloom from March 3.

Robert Filliou was a French artist, poet, and a central figure in the Fluxus movement. His works are characterized by humor, poetry, and a playful approach to philosophical questions. Filliou participated in documenta 5 and 6 (1972, 1977) and Skulptur Projekte Münster (1987). During his professorship at the HFBK Hamburg, he conceived a Biennale of Peace, which René Block realized in Hamburg in 1986.
In January 1975, the Galerie René Block presented Robert Filliou’s exhibition A World of False Fingerprints. The exhibition featured all 98 copies of his edition of the same name, published by Edition Block. We will be displaying the multiple in our KIF – KUNST IM FENSTER display window on Schaperstraße starting January 20.

Just a few meters away from KIF, in the former premises of the Galerie René Block in this building, Rebecca Horn opened her first solo exhibition in March 1973. Her body-related installation Körperraum (Body Space) marked the beginning of a close collaboration, which also resulted in the limited edition object Handschuhfinger (Glove Fingers) from the same year, about which the artist later wrote:
“The glove fingers are made of such light material that I can move my fingers without effort. I feel, touch, and grasp with them, maintaining a fixed distance from the objects I touch. The lever movement of the extended fingers enhances the sense of touch in the hand. I feel how I touch, see how I grasp, and control the distances between the objects and myself at a distance of my own choosing.”
Both Körperraum and Handschuhfinger are part of a series of body extensions that have been emerging in Rebecca Horn’s work since the late 1960s, combining sculptural elements with the medium of performance.
For her first exhibition in New York in 1976, Rebecca Horn created the walk-in sculpture The Chinese Fiancée. The exhibition at the René Block Gallery was accompanied by the New York premiere of the artist’s early films at the Anthology Film Archives.

Exactly 60 years ago to the day, on November 17, 1964, Galerie René Block opened Gerhard Richter’s first solo exhibition in Berlin entitled „Bilder des Kapitalistischen Realismus“. For the opening, the artist himself wanted to give a speech. But neither Richter nor Block were able to pay for the artist to fly from Düsseldorf to Berlin, so Richter recorded his speech on tape, which was played at the vernissage. Early works by the artist were shown, including „Familie“ (1964), „Arnold Bode“ (1964), „Terese Andeszka“ (1964) and „Stukas“ (1964). To accompany the exhibition, his first catalogue was published.

To mark the 60th anniversary of our first Gerhard Richter exhibition, we are showing early prints and archive material by and about Gerhard Richter at Prager Straße 5. The exhibition is accompanied by more recent editions by Edition Block.

The dowry is a tradition that dates back to ancient times. The term refers to the goods that a woman brings into the marital household. These are valuable, often handcrafted items such as sewing and knitting projects, which are usually made and collected by the woman’s parents during her childhood.
The lace covers symbolize both close family ties and separation and detachment from them. At the same time, these semi-transparent covers conceal memories of the past and reveal a vague hope for an uncertain future.
I cover my body with the “dowry” lace that my mother made for me.
(Mehtap Baydu)

Jarosław Kozłowski is considered one of the most influential conceptual artists in Poland. He works primarily in cycles as formal variations on recurring ideas, and his multimedia and often text-based work, characterized by linguistic sharpness, humor, and poetry, is closely related to the Fluxus movement.

Rhetorical Figures II consists of two very different parts: a cassette individually designed by the artist as a unique piece using excerpts from political news articles from various newspapers, and a one-meter-long LED light strip. As in many of his consistently humorous and analytical works, Kozłowski explores rhetoric, irony, and vocabulary by taking words from public discussions and the media and reassembling them into a flowing text on an LED sign. In this variation of Rhetorical Figures, he reviews the names of 20 capital cities (e.g., Berlin, Paris, Cairo, Johannesburg, New York, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Tokyo …) after the words “NO NEWS FROM.” The expectation of the LED display as a bearer of the latest news is thus disappointed in an absurd reversal of the text content to non-information. By combining different media—printed newspapers and digital neon signs—Kozłowski also refers to their connection with power and politics.

This exhibition commemorates a long-standing collaboration. Between 1964 and 1977, K.H. Hödicke had nine solo exhibitions at the Galerie René Block in Berlin and New York (five of them on Schaperstraße), and was also represented in twelve group exhibitions and four film evenings. Shop windows and reflections in shop windows were the theme of his first exhibition, Passages, in 1965. In his first screen prints on canvas from 1967, Hödicke also experimented with distortions of the original image motif of a New York shop window.
In a series of material paintings created between 1967 and 1969, such as Cleaner VII (1969), Hödicke incorporated manual windshield wipers that appear to remove paint from the picture ground or the glass frame. Sometimes even the pictorial ground itself—which could be interpreted as an iconoclastic act, or a humorous approach to the “shaped canvas.” The editions Windrad (Windmill, 1970) and Ponte Vecchio (1972) transform tourist postcards into sculptural objects, with the eruption of the Stromboli volcano driving the windmill and the map of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence manifesting its arch between two bricks. The prints Wo ist der Elefant? (1972), Jungsozialistin im Wald (1972), and Wo ist der Maler? (1972) were part of the suitcase edition Weekend.
The Hödicke who appears here remains, of course, a painter, but his works explicitly reveal a conceptual or experimental-analytical approach that is also imbued with anarchistic humor.

For the work Papierkorb (Wastebasket), which was produced in five versions differing in form and content, Metzel tongue-in-cheek takes the concept underlying his folds even further. The aluminum sculptures, which resemble crumpled paper but are created using a complex printing process and craftmanship, are no longer presented as wall objects, which would make their status as works of art obvious, but are presented as trompe-l’œils in the container in which they are disposed of. The wastebasket itself, more or less forcibly “worked” by Metzel, becomes a piece of art here. As ambivalent material images, the editions trace the artistic creative process between design and rejection, the will to compose and destroy, while at the same time satirizing it. What accumulates in the studio, discarded as ideas and seemingly carelessly thrown away – sketches, color samples, magazine pages – flows back into the sphere of art through elaborate material refinement.

With works by Joseph Beuys, KP Brehmer, Stanley Brouwn, James Lee Byars, Giuseppe Chiari, Sunah Choi, Ayse Erkmen, Ludwig Gosewitz, K.H. Hödicke, IMI Knoebel, Arthur Köpcke, Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Alicja Kwade, Konrad Lueg, Christine Moldrickx, Sigmar Polke, Tomas Schmit, Wolf Vostell and Stefan Wewerka.

In the new year, Edition Block is opening a branch called KIF – KUNST IM FENSTER (ART IN THE WINDOW) at Schaperstraße 11, where regularly changing window exhibitions will be shown.
This marks a return to its roots for Edition Block, as the shop gallery on Schaperstraße was the publisher’s very first location from its founding in 1966 until 1979. After that, the space was used by Ursula Block’s record gallery gelbe MUSIK until 2014.
The first exhibition shows a selection of works from the Edition Block archive, as well as new editions by Sunah Choi and KH Hödicke. The exhibited works are accompanied by the red special edition of the catalog of works “Drei Hubwagen und ein Blatt Papier”, which will be published in January in a limited edition of 12.

With works by Rosa Barba, Mehtap Baydu, Marcel Broodthaers, John Cage, Sunah Choi, Ayşe Erkmen, Ceal Floyer, Richard Hamilton, Mona Hatoum, K.H. Hödicke, Šejla Kamerić, Gülsün Karamustafa, Jarosław Kozłowski, Alicja Kwade, Inge Mahn, Olaf Metzel, Christine Moldrickx, Navid Nuur, Nasan Tur, Ebru Özseçen, Mariana Vassileva and Wolf Vostell.

In 1964, René Block opened his gallery in the art diaspora of West Berlin with the now legendary exhibition Neodada, Pop, Decollage, Kapitalistischer Realismus, showing artists who updated the old medium of graphics in social, political, and economic terms. This was immediately followed by exhibitions on Fluxus, an international art movement whose works, in the wake of Marcel Duchamp, materialised primarily in objects alongside events. This naturally led to the founding of Edition Block in 1966, which continues to produce and distribute edition art to this day.
The artistic spectrum of Edition Block has, of course, been constantly renewed and expanded over the past 60 years. Also in terms of media: records, videos, books, CDs etc. have joined the graphics and multiples, so that with Edition Block, another art history of post-war modernism could be written, an essentially democratic, intermedial, subversive art history.
(Michael Glasmeier)

Following the exhibition Drei Hubwagen und ein Blatt Papier at the Neues Museum in Nuremberg and the publication of the annotated catalogue of the same name by Edition Block at Schirmer/Mosel Verlag this summer, the exhibition Nothing but Editions… shows a selection of the editions published by Edition Block.

As a Hommage to Richard Hamilton (1922 – 2011), who would have turned 100 this year, the exhibition shows prints and multiples by the artist.

As an artist and filmmaker, Rosa Barba combines films, sculptures, installations, live performances, text works, and publications based on the material and conceptual qualities of cinema. The publication project Printed Cinema, which she has been publishing since 2004, continues her audiovisual work as a personal reflection on images. It deals with the gaps, ellipses, and dialectics—essentially concepts of modernism—that articulate themselves in the space between images. For Edition Block, a series of silkscreen prints on waste paper was created in the context of this group of works. Block had occasionally collected and saved some of the multiple-printed sheets that are produced during the printing process when excess or faulty prints are overprinted again to test the color regulation of the printing press, because he was interested in the randomly created combinations of arbitrary motifs — an interest he shares with artist Rosa Barba, who also works with waste paper for an edition of Printed Cinema.

Rosa Barba used these inherently exciting random products from Block’s collection, which represent different decades and exist in a variety of combinations, as backgrounds for screen prints in white or dark green with motifs from her own work in multiple variations. Thus, a copy from Color Clocks: Verticals Lean Occasionally Consistently Away from Viewpoints (2012)—an installation consisting of a total of three kinetic film sculptures, each representing a color based on text—appears as a white shadow on a print sheet of On Kawara’s I Am Still Alive telegrams and Berlin city maps; a detail from a film drawing from the 35 mm film object Uncertain Themes – and Therefore Abstract (2021) on the poster print for the exhibition John Cage, Nam June Paik (DAAD Gallery, Berlin), which in turn was printed on illustrated calendar pages in 1982; or the film still of an excavator shovel from the 16 mm film Somnium (2011), inspired by Johannes Kepler’s science fiction novel of the same name, about Lawrence Weiner’s contribution Polaris for the graphic portfolio produced in the context of the 8th Sydney Biennale, The Readymade Boomerang. Icons from readymade, conceptual art, and Fluxus enter into complex relationships with the themes and motifs that recur in Barba’s own work: film as subject and medium, cultivated landscape, time, sound, writing, and color.

Dem Frieden eine Form geben (Giving Peace a Shape) is the title of a print portfolio published as part of the Art of Peace Biennial in Hamburg in 1985. The Biennale was based on an idea by Robert Filliou, who wrote an appeal that was sent out worldwide as an invitation to artists, describing the intention of the project: “This is an appeal to tie three strands together again – art, knowledge and wisdom – to form a new authenticity capable of developing for us an alternative to disaster. We are all against war. But what are we for? For peace, we say. But what is peace?” (Robert Filliou)
The project involved 391 artists from 33 countries, whose contributions attempted to trace the elusive concept, “to articulate the extremely sensitive state of ‘peace,’ to formulate the sound, shape and feeling of peace,” as Block writes in his text on the exhibition. Since the exhibition project had to manage on a very tight budget, the idea arose to publish a print portfolio to provide additional funding for the project. It was published as a linen box titled Dem Frieden eine Form geben (Giving Peace a Shape) and contains an object by John Cage, a pencil drawing by Robert Filliou, offset prints by Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik and Lawrence Weiner, etchings by KP Brehmer and André Thomkins, and a screen print by Emmett Williams. The works in the portfolio refer to the exhibition in very different ways.

Prints and Multiples by Henning Christiansen, Nam June Paik, Gerhard Richter, Wolf Vostell

New Editions by Claus Böhmler, Sunah Choi, Ayşe Erkmen, Ceal Floyer, Jarosław Kozłowski, Alicja Kwade, Olaf Metzel, Christine Moldrickx, Navid Nuur, Mariana Vassileva

Claus Böhmler’s (1939 – 2017) three-hour video work Record Archive on Videotape from 1987 is finally available as a DVD edition. Two editions by the Korean artist Sunah Choi have their premiere with us: The free-hanging sculpture Karo (2020) was created in nine copies (with three variations). Her series of seven photograms is compiled in a portfolio under the name Camou (2020).
With Ayşe Erkmen we are releasing the smallest sculpture ever presented at the Skulpturenpark in Cologne, Lonesome George (2020), as a multiple object in seven copies. Ceal Floyer also produced seven copies of her first object for Edition Block, A4 (Reconnected) (2020). One of the most strained clichés of our time, “political correct”, has been lovingly embroidered by Jarosław Kozłowski as a Slogan (1999/2020) on canvas. Our most recent collaboration with Alicja Kwade resulted in the poetic object Nachts (2020), which comes framed and in a cassette. Olaf Metzel contributes the partially reissued metal folds Die die Die (Dieter Roth) (2011/2019) and Warhol (2019) to this year’s edition program, and the new Papierkorb (2019). New to Edition Block’s program are Christine Moldrickx and Navid Nuur. From Christine Moldrickx we edited an object to be installed by the owner himself (Threads, 2020), and with Spion (2020) a charcoal drawing with collage. Navid Nuur is introduced with the hand-forged, powder-coated metal drawing Untitled (Post Holocene) (2020), which seems to emerge from a four-color ballpoint pen. Still largely unknown is the photographic work of Mariana Vassileva. With Highway Dream (2014/2020) and The Big Puddle (2013/2020) we are opening a series of photographic editions that will expand the program of Edition Block.

For the Edition Block Sunah Choi has designed two new editions – Karo and Camou.
The three variations of the edition Karo (of 3 copies each) is presented in the exhibition for the first time in an expansive installation. The point of departure for the work is Sunah Choi’s longstanding preoccupation with the motif of the window as a sculptural element, as well as with the design and function of window grilles, as they have been used for centuries in different cultures. They combine functional – protection against break in or break out – and decorative aspects, geometric and floral forms. Seven rhombic elements hang freely in space on robes, whereby there are three variations, each differing in the angular sizes of the rhombuses and the density of the grating.
Organically shaped omissions were milled into the geometric grids made of powder-coated steel, which were inserted at a slight angle into the frames. The shapes of these omissions are based on fallen leaves that the artist has collected and carefully archived. In their minimalism, albeit radically abstracted, they allude to the ornaments of wrought-iron window grilles, often based on plant motifs.
To emphasize the impression of the window, whose primary function is to let in or regulate light, two projections cast differently colored light onto opposite walls – and thus also the shadows of the grid structures, which appear in different sizes and orientations. A computer-generated video simulates the lighting conditions of a day by simulating the colors of light, whereby the course of the day was reduced from 12 hours to a few minutes. Each individual sculpture in the edition comes with a beamer with the colored light projection in a loop.
In addition, Sunah Choi has developed a new series of seven photograms (in an edition of 10 each) entitled Camou. These are multi-layered “photographs without a camera”, in whose creation light, transparency and shadows also play a role. Three to four transparencies painted with abstract structures were layered, superimposed on photographic paper and then exposed, resulting in light collages in different shades of grey. The patterns are reminiscent of camouflage fabrics and are also inspired by them: the colors and patterns of camouflage differ, according to the terrain in which they are used.

With works by Joseph Beuys, KP Brehmer, John Cage, Robert Filliou, Nam June Paik, André Thomkins, Lawrence Weiner, Emmett Williams.

An exhibition marking the publication of Claus Böhmler – Smart Artist (edited by Michael Glasmeier, Naho Kawabe, and Nora Sdun, Textem Verlag Hamburg, 2019)

Media artist Claus Böhmler (1939–2017) was already “smart” when Steve Jobs was still working at Atari. However, Böhmler’s interests as an artist lie less in the development of algorithms and more in the practical use of typewriters, photocopiers, cassette recorders, record players, Super 8 film, cameras, radios, film or slide projectors, and video—in other words, media that can be used to produce a maximum amount of art in an extremely economical and easy-to-use way. He uses them, like drawing, painting, sculpture, graphic art, and performance, as self-reflective, intermedia, communicative invitations.
His work, including his acoustic and film work, is presented in this book, interwoven as it appeared side by side on his large computer screen. This is how it goes, page after page: in a constant alternation of all the media possibilities, metamorphoses, repetitions, and differences that only Böhmler is capable of in his specific simultaneity of humor, irony, observation, and politics.
In this sense, “Smart Artist” is not only an artist’s book, but can also be understood as a handbook that conveys the diverse tasks of the media craftsman Böhmler not only in images, but also—brought up to date with the latest media achievements via QR code—through simple scanning using a tablet or smartphone app in film and sound.

Prints and multiples by Nevin Aladağ, Halil Altındere, Mehtap Baydu, Ayşe Erkmen, Gülsün Karamustafa, Aydan Murtezaoğlu, Ebru Özseçen, Bülent Şangar, Sarkis and Nasan Tur

The Edition Block is pleased to present for the first time editions of Olaf Metzel in an exhibition. In this exhibition about 60 prints and multiples from the years 1985 to 2019 will be shown.
On the occasion of the exhibition, the new multiple Papierkorb of Olaf Metzel is published in the Edition Block, as well as his revisions of the existing Editions 77a (Die die Die…, 2011) and 77b (Empört, 2011).

The wall objects The Last Bee replicate the complex structure of real honeycombs, which Bjørn Nørgaard had cast in bronze in Italy. At first glance, the structures appear naturalistic, but upon closer inspection, individual bees modeled in silver can be seen sitting within them. Each of the nine casts was made directly from nine honeycomb walls with different honeycomb shapes and varies in color. Nørgaard refers to Einstein’s famous statement that if bees disappear from the surface of the earth, humans will have no more than four years to live when he writes about the work: “With the advent of modernism, the work of art was robbed of its representative potential. There is no longer a single possible authority in art that makes it universal. Every value is up for discussion. Has the discussion about the disorder of modernity versus the natural order reached its limits? Are there physical phenomena that are absolute? Is art a last rebellion?” The work was created in collaboration with Edition Møen in Denmark.

Mehtap Baydu (born in Bingöl, 1972) studied sculpture at Hacettepe University in Ankara and then completed Dorothee von Windheim’s master class at the Kassel Art School. She was awarded the UPK Prize and named Sculptor of the Year by the Ankara Sanat Kurumu in 2017. She has exhibited in Vienna, Istanbul, and Berlin, where her works and performances have been shown at Hebbel am Ufer, the Gay Museum, Galerie Zilberman, the Bröhan Museum, and the Gorki’s Herbstsalon.

Edition Block is delighted to dedicate a solo exhibition to Mehtap Baydu and to present the new joint edition “Cuma.” ‘Cuma’ (Turkish for “Friday”) refers to Friday prayers, which the artist photographed in front of the historic Hacı Bayram Mosque in Ankara. In some places, the prayer may be carried outside the mosque, which allowed Baydu, even as a woman, to step into the sea of praying men and capture the motif that was immortalized on the carpet. In order to do justice to the digital template, the work was knotted with a knot density otherwise reserved for silk carpets. Textiles in general are used repeatedly in the artist’s oeuvre—for example, in the treatment of themes such as cultural codes, social gender roles, and tradition.

The artist also explores the theme of the binary coding of spaces as male-public and female-private. While women are absent in Cuma (the obligation to perform midday prayers in community on Fridays does not apply to them), Dêrık focuses on their place in the private sphere. The video installation “Dêrık” was filmed in the artist’s home village in Eastern Anatolia. It shows various women in the intimacy of their homes, processing their experiences in Dêrık through song. Often, the songs deal with events and experiences in their immediate surroundings, the loss of a loved one, unrequited love, family members, grief, and everyday life. The improvised singing, which often serves as a means of coping and processing, takes place in private, quietly and without an audience, in which the artist sees a parallel to the hegemonic spatialization of gender roles.

Conzeption: Michael Glasmeier
In 1964, René Block opened his gallery in Berlin to confront the divided city with “Capitalist Realism”, Fluxus and sound pieces. Parallel to this, he has been realizing a comprehensive program of prints and multiples since 1966, from which the exhibition shows works that are related to language. Thus, the exhibition provides comprehensive insights into the most diverse poetic, political, conceptual strategies to make words visible within the art of the past fifty years.
With works by Joseph Beuys, Barbara Bloom, John Cage, KP Brehmer, Marcel Broodthaers, Henning Christiansen, Braco Dimitrijević, Robert Filliou, Richard Hamilton, Mona Hatoum, Ilya Kabakov, Allan Kaprow, On Kawara, Arthur Köpcke, Jarosław Kozłowski, Olaf Metzel, Dan Perjovschi, Sigmar Polke, Dieter Roth, Sarkis, Endre Tot, Nasan Tur, Ben Vautier, Lawrence Weiner, Emmett Williams and others.

In 1988, Edition Block issued Aus Australien, a portfolio of prints consisting of forty sheets by eight Australian artists. The project resulted from curator René Block’s interest and involvement in the Australian art scene. As the German coordinator of the Biennale of Sydney in 1984 and 1986, Block was introduced to the local scene, which he later introduced to Berlin in the exhibition Fünf vom Fünften at the daad-Galerie in 1986. A portfolio of prints was already being contemplated at that time and it appeared two years later. In addition to the artists in the exhibition – Richard Dunn, John Lethbridge, Mike Parr, Peter Tyndall and Ken Unsworth – invitations were extended to John Nixon, Vivienne Shark-LeWitt and Jenny Watson. Each created a suite of five sheets in classic techniques of woodcut, etching, stone lithography and silkscreen, which were printed at the Viridian Press in Melbourne.

An exhibition commemorating the 20th anniversary of the artist’s death and on the occasion of the release of the monograph Real Capital – Production (Raven Row and Koenig Books, London 2017).

Artists: Nevin Aladağ, Halil Altındere, Ayşe Erkmen, Gülsün Karamustafa, Aydan Murtezaoğlu, Ebru Özseçen, Sarkis, Bülent Şangar, Nasan Tur

The exhibition İSİMSİZ shows all editions, which were published at the Edition Block in collaboration with turkish artists since the 1990s. This exhibition project showcases two focal points of René Block’s work as a publisher and curator: His engagement with multiples and with contemporary art from Turkey. Both have been playing an important role in his work and have accompanied him along his way for many years. As a curator, Block was one of the major forces behind bringing international visibility to the Turkish art scene, starting with the 1994 exhibition “Iskele. Contemporary Art from Turkey” at the ifa galleries in Berlin, Stuttgart and Bonn. In the following year, this effort culminated in Block directing the 4th Istanbul Biennial titled “Orient/ation” that would permanently place Istanbul on the global art scene map.

The format of the multiple and its various possibilities are demonstrated in a special way within this exhibition project. With İSİMSİZ (Edition Block, Berlin) and OHNE TITEL (Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul) the very same exhibition is shown at two different places simultaneously and with that reflects the egalitarian character of the multiple. After all it is situated beyond the hierarchically structured logic of original, copy, and reproduction, pointing to something coexistent and equivalent instead.

This exhibition marks the resumption of a long-standing collaboration. Between 1964 and 1977, Hödicke had nine solo exhibitions at the René Block Gallery in Berlin and New York, and was represented there in twelve group exhibitions and four film evenings. “Original + Fälschung” focuses on object-based works, as well as graphics and films by the artist, who is generally known as a neo-expressionist painter, showing examples from his – thoroughly painterly – experiments with materials such as glass or tar from larger groups of works.

Most of the works on display were originally planned as editions, but some remained unique due to a lack of demand.

A largely unknown aspect of Hödicke’s oeuvre is his playful, experimental 16mm films from the late 1960s and early 1970s, which deal with similar issues as his multiples and picture objects—such as found ready-mades or humorous allusions to art history. In Kennst Du Kanada? (1967), for example, his painter friend Markus Lüpertz depicts Picasso at work, and AD2 (in advance of the broken leg) from 1971 alludes both to Duchamp’s ready-made In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915/64) and to his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912).

The Hödicke who appears here remains, of course, a painter, but the selection of works explicitly reveals a conceptual or experimental-analytical approach that is also imbued with anarchic humor.

What can be considered a principle of Richter’s painting is equally applicable to the artist’s printmaking. From almost the very beginning of his career, there has been a close connection between the two fields of printmaking and painting, which is evident both in his choice of similar motifs and in their artistic treatment. The focus is always on a fundamental questioning of contemporary pictorial possibilities.

The phenomena of blurring and the resulting fleetingness of motifs, which he developed through painterly means, also find their counterpart in his graphic works. Using the specific possibilities offered by the production processes of industrial printing technology, Richter manipulates the motifs in such a way that they appear only indistinctly and refuse any visual and cognitive access.

A large part of Richter’s prints were created in the 1960s and 1970s. The principle of the photographic template, which is so characteristic of Richter’s painting from this period, is also found in his prints. Here, Richter makes use of photographic reproduction techniques such as offset printing, screen printing, and collotype. The motifs range from newspaper templates, personal photos, and photo montages to color charts.
On the occasion of the artist’s 85th birthday, the exhibition shows a selection of early prints from the 1960s and 1970s.

Artists: Joseph Beuys, KP Brehmer, Marcel Broodthaers, Maria Eichhorn, Ayşe Erkmen, Richard Hamilton, Mona Hatoum, K.H. Hödicke, Jarosław Kozłowski, Alicja Kwade, Inge Mahn, Olaf Metzel, Bjørn Nørgaard, Sigmar Polke, Nasan Tur, Mariana Vassileva, Wolf Vostell.. and others

The exhibition features objects, graphics, and books that we were able to realize with the three Danish artists Henning Christiansen (1932–2008), Arthur Köpcke (1928–1977), and Bjørn Nørgaard (born 1947).

The year 2017 will mark the 75th anniversary of the massacre of Lidice that was committed by the National Socialists. In commemoration of this incident the two previous Lidice exhibitions »Hommage à Lidice« (1967) and »Pro Lidice« (1997) will be continued by a third project »Remember Lidice« (2015).
In response to an appeal issued in 1967 by Sir Barnett Stross, head of the “Lidice-shall-live” committee, René Block invited, both in 1967 and 1997, young artists that were representative of the current German art scene to donate a work for a museum to be built in Lidice. The resulting collection distinguishes itself by high artistic quality and a cross section of the respective contemporary art production.
For the project »Remember Lidice« artists have been invited for the third time to donate works for Lidice. With this chapter, the frame of reference will once more be broadened: What started out as a German-Czech issue with the contributions of 21 West-German artists in 1967 (»Hommage à Lidice«), and continued in 1997 as a project of a united Germany with contributions from 31 artists (»Pro Lidice«), will in 2015 become an international subject matter, with the participation of 44 international artists.
The wish to expand the collection in Lidice, which is currently exhibited in the former community centre now reconstructed as a museum, by the newly donated works is meant to be a renewed gesture of solidarity.
Beginning in September, the works will successively be collected in the exhibition space of Edition Block and can be seen there until February 2016. The once completed collection will also be shown at the Kunsthalle Mannheim before it will officially be handed over to Lidice.

Participating artists: Adel Abidin, Lene Adler-Petersen, Nevin Aladağ, Halil Altındere, Maja Bajević, Rosa Barba, Christian Boltanski, Elina Brotherus, Olga Chernyszewa, Sunah Choi, A K Dolven, Braco Dimitrijević, Ayşe Erkmen, VALIE EXPORT, Mona Hatoum, Pravdoliub Ivanov, Sanja Iveković, Alfredo Jaar, Šejla Kamerić, Gülsün Karamustafa, Jarosław Kozłowski, Daniel Knorr, Kim Sooja, Alicja Kwade, Maurizio Nannucci, Bjørn Nørgaard, Şener Özmen, Dan Perjovschi, Meriç Algün Ringborg, Sarkis, Chris Snee, Nedko Solakov, Superflex, Cengiz Tekin, Endre Tót, Nasan Tur, Hale Tenger, Ken Unsworth, Thu Van Tran, Mariana Vassileva, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Wentworth, Maaria Wirkkala, Haegue Yang

In the early 1960s, KP Brehmer chose the term Trivialgrafik (trivial graphics) for his graphic work, associating himself with Capitalist Realism (Brehmer, Lueg, Polke, Richter), under whose banner the first exhibition at the René Block Gallery took place in 1964. While trivial graphics dealt with the iconography of consumption and the image of people—especially the sexualized image of women—in advertising, from 1966 onwards it was primarily the propagandistic potential of stamps that Brehmer explored in a large group of works from various thematic series (such as views of Cologne Cathedral, the Brandenburg Gate, and the swastika in Deutsche Werte, 1966). At the same time, he began to use the formal vocabulary of infographics, statistics, geographical, climatic, and political maps, as well as color scales and patterns to “visualize real socio-political processes” (Brehmer).

In formal-aesthetic, pseudo-scientific experimental arrangements, KP Brehmer graphically depicts political, sociological, economic, and later also psychological and emotional states (Korrektur der Nationalfarben [Correction of National Colors], 1970, or Seele und Gefühl eines Arbeiters [Soul and Feelings of a Worker], 1978/80), evaluating the various political, psychological, and atmospheric connotations of colors (e.g., Testbild TV (Braunwerte) [Test Pattern TV (Brown Values)], 1970, Gelbe Gefahr [Yellow Peril], 1972). KP Brehmer died in 1997 at the age of 59. From May 1 to July 25, 2015, Edition Block is showing a selection of his experimental and innovative prints in a solo exhibition.

Editions by Marina Abramovic, Nevin Aladağ, Halil Altındere, Joseph Beuys, Barbara Bloom, KP Brehmer, Marcel Broodthaers, John Cage, Giuseppe Chiari, Henning Christiansen, Braco Dimitrijevic, A K Dolven, Maria Eichhorn, Ayşe Erkmen, Ludwig Gosewitz, Richard Hamilton, Mona Hatoum, Dick Higgins, K.H. Hödicke, Ilya Kabakov, Šejla Kamerić, Allan Kaprow, Gülsün Karamustafa, On Kawara, Per Kirkeby, Jarosław Kozłowski, Alicja Kwade, Konrad Lueg, Vlado Martek, Olaf Metzel, Aydan Murtezaoğlu, Ebru Özseçen, Nam June Paik, Dan Perjovschi, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Rühm, Anri Sala, Şangar, Sarkis, Dieter Schnebel, Endre Tót, Nasan Tur, Wolf Vostell, Lawrence Weiner

KP Brehmer, K.H. Hödicke, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Wolf Vostell