Anna Oppermann: Ensembles 1968-1992

In the late sixties German artist Anna Oppermann (1940–1993) began creating installations, which she called Ensembles, containing references to Pop Art, Arte Povera, and Conceptual Art. Assembled using found objects, photographs, sketches, personal texts, quotations, and colored photographic screens, these installations were often misinterpreted by contemporaries as purely biographical statements. The artist’s intention, however, was to use these highly complex works to trigger the viewer’s thought process, and to show that they could always be understood in new and different ways. Her Ensembles allowed viewers to imagine aesthetic and theoretical decision-making processes, and it is precisely the postmodern ambiguity and performativity that make her open-ended works seem so intriguing today.This publication, featuring a complete index of the Ensembles, re-evaluates Oppermann’s oeuvre. It provides a comprehensive documentation of the Stuttgart venue, and examines the works from various theoretical perspectives, keeping the state of contemporary art in mind. Exhibition schedule: Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, April 17–August 12, 2007 · Generali Foundation, Vienna, August 28–December 16, 2007