Introduction

Esther Schipper is pleased to present Karin Sander’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. To mark the closing of Johnen Galerie’s Marienstraße space, Karin Sander will present a new work celebrating the gallery’s exhibition history, and she will revisit her own 1991 work, Floor. Karin Sander’s exhibition opens June 3 and runs through July 8, 2016.

Karin Sander’s sculptural intervention Floor was first executed in New York, in 1991. At the time, Gregory Volk wrote: “A new floor has been installed upon the gallery’s own floor and slightly elevated (…) The floor piece is a subtle disruption within the gallery. Quite close to the ground, it seems to float. It simultaneously invites the observer to walk upon it just like any other floor, while making the observer cautious.” Invited to reconsider their habitual expectations of a gallery visit, viewers will become sculptures themselves, walking on a giant plinth.

Documenting the thirty-two year history of Galerie Johnen+Schöttle and Johnen Galerie, Sander has culled about 250 images from the gallery archive, each representing one past exhibition. Presented in ready-made stands, the set of images (13 x 18 cm) represents a record of all the gallery exhibitions, of all the artists, as well as the photographers who documented the exhibitions—and in some cases both.

Analogously to Sander’s first exhibition at Esther Schipper’s gallery space in 2012, which consisted of custom-made carpeting mirroring one room’s floor plan and the tipping-over of then freshly restructured drywall elements throughout the other rooms, both works on display can be understood as analytical interventions in the gallery’s history.

Another parallel could be drawn to Sander’s 2011 Kernbohrungen (Core Drilling) conceived on occasion of her solo exhibition at the N.B.K. in Berlin: for the duration of her exhibition, the Kunstverein’s office paper trash was dropped directly through five holes drilled through the floor of the upperfloor administration into the otherwise empty exhibition spaces below, creating something akin to a sculptural portrait of the institution’s internal processes.

Visitors to Sander’s exhibition in the Johnen Galerie location will sense 253 exhibitions: one that exists here and now and near 252 that existed in the past many of them in this very space–which has now become slightly elevated.