Art Exhibition
The Chicago Center for Caspar David Friedrich Studies Library

Exhibition Opening

Wed, 09/04/2024
6:00 PM Goethe-Institut Chicago

Join us for the exhibition opening reception, featuring remarks by Dr. Leonhard Emmerling, Director of the Goethe-Institut Chicago, Dirk Schulz, Deputy Consul General of Germany in Chicago, and Dieter Roelstraete, Curator of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Caspar David Friedrich, the premier landscape painter of the Romantic period whose images of lone individuals in windswept scenes of sylvan desolation have become integral to Germany’s visual sense of self. It is above all Friedrich’s iconic Wanderer Above the Sea of Mists (1818) that has been especially strongly associated, in the global imagination, with the mystique of German-ness and all that this charged notion entails.

The Goethe-Institut Chicago will celebrate this anniversary with the inauguration, on the eve of Friedrich’s birthday, of 'The Chicago Center for Caspar David Friedrich Studies Library,' an art installation conceived by Dieter Roelstraete in collaboration with Zachary Cahill and honorary members Assaf Evron and Elmgreen & Dragset. This “library” consists of the Center’s expanding collection of books, magazines and records sporting said Wanderer on their covers, ranging in tone from the frightening and ridiculous to the appropriately sublime.

'The Chicago Center for Caspar David Friedrich Studies Library' is, of course, in the first instance a monument to the memory of the man – but it is also a three-dimensional reflection on the power of a single image to insinuate itself in the bloodstream of global visual culture, and withstand (or not) even the crudest attempts at appropriation. In Friedrich’s talismanic Rückenfigur we come face to face, so to speak, with the power of the meme avant la lettre.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of talks illuminating different aspects of the library. 

Dieter Roelstraete is the curator of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, where he also teaches. Recent projects at the Neubauer Collegium Gallery have featured the work of Gelitin, Rick Lowe, Pope.L, Martha Rosler, Cecilia Vicuña, and Christopher Williams. He previously worked as a curator for documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens in 2017. Prior to that, he served as the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2012-2015), where he organized and co-organized The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology (2015); The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now (2015); and Kerry James Marshall: Mastry (2016), among other exhibitions. From 2003 to 2011 Roelstraete was a curator at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen in his native Belgium. In recent years, he has also curated large-scale exhibitions at the Fondazione Prada in Milan and Venice, Garage (Moscow) and S.M.A.K. (Ghent). Roelstraete has published extensively on contemporary art and related philosophical issues in numerous catalogues and journals.

The exhibition will be open during events and by appointment only on weekdays from 10am-4pm; please email info-chicago@goethe.de to request a viewing time.