Exhibition at the Gasometer Oberhausen: The Appearance of Beauty

The Gasometer Oberhausen was redeveloped as part of the project to reuse and revive the Ruhr zone, when it moved away from the iron and steel industry towards services. The Gasometer Oberhausen has established itself as a great location for giant, iconic exhibitions, in keeping with its role as a landmark.



“The Appearance of Beauty” is the name of the exhibition being held in the arresting spaces of the Gasometer Oberhausen, and one part of it is the “320° Licht – Spatial Experience” nstallation by the Urbanscreen group of artists, extended to November 2015 by popular demand.





The exhibition explores one of the major issues of our times: the relationship between the real world and the virtual world, where the boundaries are increasingly blurred. Visitors to the exhibition are greeted by about 200 artworks that have left their mark in the world, masterpieces like the Venus di Milo through to Hokusai’s “The Great Wave” and the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, artworks that express the concept of beauty at their particular moment in history. These works of art are therefore part of our collective imagination, because we all know them in one form or another – if not the originals, then in school books or on the Web.





These ongoing references to reality and imagination are emphasised by the dimensions of the reproductions on display. These images are to scale but they are not the original size, so they set up a kind of alienating effect. 
 





This makes “The Appearance of Beauty” the hands-on location of what is happening today with the Web, a geographical location without physical or temporal boundaries. As Paolo Schianchi writes in “Architecture on the web. A critical approach to communication”: The geographic border of architecture therefore cancels itself out in this new approach to communication across the surface of time, since every point in time belongs to everybody and therefore, to nobody. It simply exists, but it has a new meaning, the meaning that is intrinsic to the observers, not to those who physically move.

(Christiane Bürklein)

Exhibition “The Appearance of Beauty”
Gasometer Oberhausen, 11 April 2014 – 15 November 2015
Photography: © Gianluca Giordano