The title of the installation for ART CITY 2021, Gregor Schneider visits N. Schmidt (in the former Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna), refers to the origins of the series of works on Mr Schmidt, first evoked in Room 54 of Haus ur, the artist’s seminal work presented at the 2001 Biennale. Schneider triggers the expectation of an encounter that might allow this mysterious individual to emerge from the collective presence—a fictional character who seems finally to answer the question: who is N. Schmidt? At the same time, the museum is masked by this scenario, both as an institutional and as an architectural framework; the work is stripped of any museum-style presentation, thus neutralising it from the artist’s perspective.
The Bologna apartment offers visitors the opportunity to begin to uncover the identity of the character N. Schmidt, entering his home one at a time—his intimate, domestic space—whose experience is conceived to be misleading, offering clues to the viewer that are contradicted only a few steps later. As the artist states: “For me, it is about the dissolution of space, of a place we can no longer know. The repetition of a space to the limits of our perception, until all that remains is the suspicion of what we can no longer know.” The claustrophobic intimacy recreated by Gregor Schneider, in its disorienting quality, thus provides an important reflection on the emotional and sensory consequences of certain habits reinforced by the pandemic, such as the privileging of domestic space as a site of safety, or the increasingly widespread voyeuristic forms of relationship typical of digital experience.
