In the same year 1998, when the Gallery of Contemporary Art (GfZK) in Leipzig had moved into its final domicile – a historicist villa on the edge of the music district that had been skilfully converted and expanded by Peter Kulka – she was given the work that has since been considered iconic for her: Olaf Nicolai's "Labyrinth", an installation for which the artist had arranged the poison-green plastic brooms of the Parisian street cleaners as if they were a meadow. through which he laid a winding path – based on a Baroque pattern book for garden labyrinths.
Andreas Platthaus
Editor in charge of literature and literary life.
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This artwork, which is as colourful as it is ambiguous, was originally created for an open-air exhibition in a park in the Parisian banlieue and was initially handed over to the GfZK as a permanent loan by Nicolai's gallery owner Judy Lybke (a Leipzig art institution in its own right); In 2012, the artist himself made a donation out of it. To the delight of the people of Leipzig, whose children like to romp through the labyrinth set up in the gallery's freely accessible garden, which offers fresh green to the eyes even in winter thanks to its indestructible plastic.
Whereby the indestructibility is not so far off. Anyone who enters the labyrinth walks over a dregs of weather-related fragments and splinters of the green bristles, which has now become a nuisance for local residents: microplastic pollution. In addition, due to the deterioration, the broom equipment must also be renewed regularly, and not even in Paris itself is this cleaning instrument still used. Materials researchers and designers are currently looking for an environmentally friendly alternative to plastic brooms without sacrificing the distinctive appearance of the installation. The outcome of these efforts is still open, but the thought process is already part of the anniversary exhibition "Things That Were Are Things Again", which opened last weekend in celebration of the gallery's twenty-fifth anniversary.
Pre-revolutionary idea becomes post-revolutionary event
The history of the institution goes back further, is downright revolutionary, actually even pre-revolutionary. In the summer of 1989, even before the Monday demonstrations and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the art historian and gallery owner Klaus Werner, who lived in Leipzig (then GDR), suggested something unthinkable at the time at a meeting with the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft (then FRG): a private donor museum in the socialist state that would show international contemporary art. Werner had sensed the mood of social upheaval, and when it had swept away the SED regime, his idea could be implemented. For this, he found the right comrade-in-arms in the entrepreneur Arend Oetker from the Kulturkreis, who then decided against the art place dogs Dresden, Weimar or Potsdam for Leipzig, because he liked the bourgeois trade mentality there.
Shortly after reunification, he and Werner founded a support association for the planned GfZK, which played at changing locations in the city until it moved into its current location. Werner was director until 2001, followed by Barbara Steiner and since 2012 Franciska Zólyom. Only three people in the management position since 1990 – that can be called daring in the fast-moving field of contemporary art, but it speaks for the long-term thinking that drives the private initiators of the GfZK and has been supported by the city of Leipzig from the very beginning.