Schwitters’s Shadow Signatures: Merzbau at Sprengel Museum, Hannover, 1
Merzbau reimagining at Sprengel Museum, Hannover.
Reconstruction of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau.
Merzbau Reconstruction at Sprengel Museum Hannover.
Reconstruction of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau at Sprengel Museum.
Hannover’s Sprengel Museum is such a fascinating space this most recent visit deserves a series of discrete posts of mostly photos. It was here in 2009 to see the visiting Hund vor der Welt on loan to the Sprengel for “Die Schönheit einer zerbrechenden Welt (1910 – 1914) Franz Marc, August Macke und Robert Delaunay” exhibition that I became very focused on Marc’s portraits of Russi.
The museum still holds some Marcs and Mackes in its permanent collection but there is also much more to see, including a reconstruction the main room of one of Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbauten, created in 1983 by Peter Bissegger. Bissegger, a theatrical designer who has made several Merzbau recreations, based his reconstruction on Wilhelm Redemann’s photographs from the early 1930s. Schwitters lived in Hannover; the apartment building where this version of the Merzbau lived was destroyed in 1943.
Gwendolen Webster has written a wonderful paper full of designs and drawings from Schwitters and information about the Merzbauten in Norway and England call The Reception of the Merzbau which you can read by following the link.