For nothing and against nothing, together with the Hungarian artist Endre Tót (born in 1937 in Sümeg, has lived in Cologne since 1980) numerous people took to the streets of Schwerin one Saturday in October 2017. Carrying banners full of zeros, the participants in the Zero-Demo walked peacefully and silently through the city centre. Finally, one of the large banners was brought back to where it came from: the Staatliches Museum Schwerin. In this extraordinary moment, art and life, exhibition and demonstration were united.
Zero—and his express joy in it—determine Tót’s work in a wide variety of manifestations. For until today he still plays with them both in utterly different media and formats, for example in typewritings, mail art, artist’s books, posters, photographs, editions, works on canvas, art actions and demonstrations. In all these formally so manifold and yet so coherent works, his ambivalent artistic strategies can be seen, as they move between affirmation and negation and are borne by his emphatic individuality.
The catalogue documents the Schwerin exhibition, which mainly showed works from the collection of Christina and Jürgen Kelter from Cologne. It also provides an overview of Endre Tót’s Zero works: Art works from several decades, all of which involve nothingness, expressed by him through the figure zero or the number 0, a central group of works in Endre Tót’s oeuvre, on which he has been consistently working since the early 1970s.
Catalogue on the occasion of the exhibition of the same title of works from the Kelter Collection at the Staatliches Museum Schwerin, October 22, 2017–January 13, 2018
Edited by Deborah Bürgel on behalf of the Staatlichen Schlösser, Gärten und Kunstsammlungen Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Schwerin, 2018
Staatliche Schlösser, Gärten und Kunstsammlungen Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
Staatliches Museum Schwerin
Werderstraße 141
D-19055 Schwerin
In cooperation with
Verlag Lutz Wohlrab Berlin
Langhansstraße 64a
D-13086 Berlin
www.wohlrab-verlag.de
14,8 x 21 cm, 48 pages, full colour illustrations, some full or double page, text in German and English
EUR 6,95
ISBN: 978-3-86106-143-4