"It is not said that it will get better if it gets less. But if it is to get better, it must get less." (loosely based on Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)


With Paul Schwaderer, the association 701 e.V. is realising its new ‘PopUp Gallery’ format for the second time. After a first impact in 2019 in the Renzo Piano-designed FLOAT office building in the Medienhafen, the association is now showing a recent graduate of the Kunstakademie at the Kö-Bogen, who graduated in the summer from Martin Gostner’s class. As in 2019, Düsseldorfers will also get an “art treat to go” this time, because due to the corona, the exhibition is designed as a pure ‘shop window exhibition’ and can only be viewed from the outside.

The staging of art in a former shop at the Kö-Bogen is unusual and breaks with the museum-like presentation of artworks, because here, as in the Medienhafen in 2019, urbanity and art meet quite abruptly.

“The shop in the passage between Breuninger and Porsche Design is one of the busiest promenades in the heart of Düsseldorf. Implementing an art exhibition in the midst of this glittering fashion and business world with its tempting displays is a challenge, because the visual stimuli of the pre-Christmas range of goods and consumption are overwhelming,” says board member of 701 e.V. and curator Dr. Astrid Legge.

Paul Schwaderer counters this oversupply of goods with ‘Less Must’, a convincing statement that makes us think and curious at the same time. The artist, who was born in 1984 in Tettnang on Lake Constance and lives in Düsseldorf, was last seen in 2018 with his ‘Rembrandt Experiment’ at the Museum Kunstpalast and in 2019 in the group exhibition ‘Kinetic Machines’ at the Krefelder Kunstverein and MMIII Kunstverein Mönchengladbach. For the exhibition at the Kö-Bogen, he created a multimedia round dance consisting of 2 larger video works and 2 sculptural objects in space.
With Paul Schwaderer, the association 701 e.V. is realising its new format of the ‘PopUp Gallery’ for the second time. After a first impact in 2019 in the Renzo Piano-designed FLOAT office building in the Medienhafen, the association is now showing at the Kö-Bogen a recent graduate of the Kunstakademie, who graduated in the summer from Martin Gostner’s class. As in 2019, Düsseldorfers will also get an “art treat to go” this time, because due to the corona, the exhibition is designed as a pure ‘shop window exhibition’ and can only be viewed from the outside.

The staging of art in a former shop at the Kö-Bogen is unusual and breaks with the museum-like presentation of artworks, because here, as in the Medienhafen in 2019, urbanity and art meet quite abruptly.

“The shop in the passage between Breuninger and Porsche Design is one of the busiest promenades in the heart of Düsseldorf. Implementing an art exhibition in the midst of this glittering fashion and business world with its tempting displays is a challenge, because the visual stimuli of the pre-Christmas range of goods and consumption are overwhelming,” says board member of 701 e.V. and curator Dr Astrid Legge.

Paul Schwaderer counters this oversupply of goods with ‘Less Must’, a convincing statement that makes us think and curious at the same time. The artist, who was born in 1984 in Tettnang on Lake Constance and lives in Düsseldorf, was last seen in 2018 with his “Rembrandt Experiment” at the Museum Kunstpalast and in 2019 in the group exhibition “Kinetic Machines” at the Krefelder Kunstverein and MMIII Kunstverein Mönchengladbach. For the exhibition at the Kö-Bogen, he created a multimedia round dance consisting of 2 larger video works and 2 sculptural objects in space.

The question of how much or little information is necessary to still recognise a person as such is illustrated par excellence in the 2-part video work ‘Kapitulation I + II’. Freely following the motto ‘less is more’, a mathematical algorithm slowly reduces the views of two portrait busts to their basic geometric forms. When looking at the two rotating figures – female / male and at the same time self-portrait of the artist – the question inevitably arises whether what remains is to be interpreted as a condensed essence or meaningless data residue. And is the reduction possibly also an act of liberation? Perhaps less image also means less must!

This is also made ‘clear’ by the video work of the same name lying on the floor. Glowing LED lights form a stylised hand that performs different gestures in slow succession. The video is played in one colour on a red LED matrix, reduced to the absolute minimum of information density.

Similar to the work ‘R100G’ shown at the Kunstpalast in 2018, which made reference to Rembrandt’s famous ‘Hundertguldenblatt’, individual hand gestures and signs can be seen here, but now they are freely chosen and lose their legibility and interpretability due to the lack of an explanatory context. The artist describes them as ‘white spots’ in interpersonal communication, as an indeterminable state for which there is as yet no concept, no category and no images.

“What must a person be like who dares to explore the ‘very very big questions’?” This is the question Schwaderer asks in ‘Must I Dig a Hole Under the Earth?’ Three screens on the front wall display a video ticker that formulates a total of 61 questions and answers. The questions refer to the artist’s speculative idea of building a ‘world machine’ modelled on the LHC (particle accelerator) at the CERN research centre in Geneva.

The underlying consideration is whether religion, philosophy and art may have had their day as models for explaining the world and whether science and basic research in physics can provide more contemporary answers to the big questions about the origin of things. Schwaderer answers the resulting consideration of whether scientists and engineers today are not the real and undiscovered artists of our time in his very own, subliminally humorous way: he plans to defy science and build his own particle accelerator. In order to clarify in advance what skills and qualities one must have as an artist for this, he developed a “Do I have to…?” – question catalogue, which a physicist at the Swiss nuclear research centre CERN had him answer with a binary yes/no.

The deliberate reduction of what is basically an incredibly complex and multi-layered issue to a simple question/answer game seems downright brutal, but it forcefully questions the artistic conditions that make works of this magnitude possible: Their focus on the pure gain of knowledge away from direct usability, the task of making invisible structures and connections recognisable and, last but not least, the professionalisation of trial and error.

Prominently positioned in the shop window and yet inconspicuous, the work ‘an extended pause’ can be seen, a rotating glass tube filled with a white powder on a black cuboid. The slow rotation causes the rock powder to pile up until the material can no longer defy gravity. It breaks down, creating crevices and fractures that are reminiscent of natural processes such as glacial movements or geological rock reshaping. And although the reel rotates exceedingly slowly, it shows, as if in fast-forward, a process that in reality stretches over centuries. Fast-forward and slow-motion are very close together here.