The MACBA in Konrad Fischer’s House

The Barcelona museum exhibits the Düsseldorf creator’s art collect

From May 15 to October 12 at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona. MACBA

Curator: Friedrich Meschede

Works: nearly 300

Organizers: MACBA and Museum Kurhaus Kleve

Educated at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, where he met Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter and Kuttner, Konrad Fischer was quick to join the young avant-garde circles of West Germany. In the early years of his career, his work focused on motifs associated with sports (boxers, soccer players), but in 1965 he began to show an interest in serial patterns, using industrial fabrics and sheets of plastic to create mural installations. Years later he would hold impressive exhibitions in Munich and Paris featuring fabrics painted with phosphorescent colors which captured the shadows of the people contemplating them.

In 1967, a gallery opened in downtown Düsseldorf that would soon become an active laboratory of ideas which had a significant influence on prominent artists of the second half of the 20th century in both the United States and Europe. In addition to works created by Fischer between 1964 and 1969, the exhibition on view at the MACBA until this coming October features a collection of nearly 300 works which Fischer and his wife Dorothee guarded carefully for almost half a century. The pieces were created by forty of the world’s best artists – Carl Andre, Bruce Nauman, Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, On Kawara, Eva Hesse, Piero Manzoni, Gilbert & George, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Mario Merz, Joseph Beuys, Juan Muñoz, Thomas Schütte, Jannis Kounellis and Gregor Schneider, among others – and some are practically unknown rarities.

The three sections into which this exhibition is divided reflect Fischer’s tri-faceted talent as an artist, exhibition curator and gallerist. The works he brought into his home offer us a firsthand experience of the early years of the minimalist and conceptual art movements; many first-rate artists from Germany and abroad had their first exhibitions at Konrad Fischer’s house, and from there the works travelled to Europe’s great private and public collections (the artist cultivated an important network of international contacts for this purpose).

Several of the pieces which can be seen at the MACBA, and later at the Kurhaus Kleve, were dedicated to members of the Fischer family by the artists, evidencing the gallerist’s close  relationship with some of the best artists of his time and the exceptional importance of creation in the life project he shared with his wife.