Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden presents Room Service

Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden presents Room Service an exhibition on view 22.3.2014 – 22.6.2014.

The Federal State Exhibtion Baden-Württemberg is dealing with the myths that are entwined with the hotel as a semi-public space. Reflecting motifs of desire, it serves as a backdrop for the most intimate occurrences as well as matters of state. Over the past two hundred years the topos of the hotel has increasingly become a subject of artistic interest. Artists have not only examined the hotel as a motif but have appropriated its rooms, decorating and inhabiting them. With the Federal State Exhibition Baden-Württemberg the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden traces these multi-faceted relationships over time. The exhibition also examines problematic social aspects of this phenomenon. To capture the mythic dimensions of the hotel, the exhibition Room Service – On the Hotel in the Arts and Artists in the Hotel at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden is also accompanied by an exhibition route that leads through the city’s prominent hotels. Numerous artists are presenting works in hotel rooms, lobbies, and parking garages and have in some cases developed these projects specifically for the exhibition.

In the rooms of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden the exhibition traces the historical development of a new culture of travel from the 19th century to the present. The earliest work on view dates from 1824. A work by the British artist John Constable, it shows a beach scene with a fishing boat and the first grand hotels of Brighton, England in the background. During his travels the artist Joseph Mallord William Turner used the interior of hotel rooms as well as the view from the hotel room as a recurring motif. Max Beckmann was fascinated by the various realities and perspectives that came together in the hotel. In contrast, his contemporary George Grosz concentrated on figures from the demimonde of major urban centers, whom he portrayed before the backdrop of pulsing hotels. With his iconic portraits the photographer August Sander created an epochal panoramic view of the German society of his time. Here, one finds images of a hotel director next to those of a chambermaid and a porter. The widely traveled artist Martin Kippenberger ultimately made drawings on hotel stationary his hallmark and thus created a kind of fictive auto-geography. For her work »L’Hôtel« the French artist Sophie Calle assumed the role of a chambermaid, spying on the guests of a Venetian hotel for three weeks.