- Jede Sekunde 1m2
- The Garden, Birds and a Hedge
- You do Voodoo
- Car Crush - a Mandala
- Mandala
- Erzeugen Tomaten einen Hang zur Schwermut?
- Hohe Heide Sticker Sammel Heft
- A World of Difference
- Property
- Property (Letters to the Editor)
- The Collection

Alles was in der Zürcher Verlagsszene Rang und Namen hatte, traf sich am 1. September zur feierlichen Eröffnung des «Begehbaren Buchs» in der Villa Mainau. Bis Ende Monat inszenieren über 20 Verlage in je einem Zimmer der Abbruchvilla je ein Buch. Danach wird das Haus durch einen Neubau ersetzt und das denkmalgeschützte Kino Razzia umfassend renoviert und in ein Restaurant umgebaut.
Hochparterre präsentiert im begehbaren Buch die Ausstellung «Jede Sekunde 1 m2», das ist die Fläche, die in der Schweiz jede Sekunde verbaut wird. Dieses Zubauen geschieht oft ohne Verstand und übergeordneten Plan. So werden diese Flächen zum zentralen Problem der Siedlungs- und Gesellschaftsentwicklung der Schweiz. Denn die Landschaft ist der Pfeiler unserer Identität: Wir lieben die Berge und die Seen, die histrischen Dörfer und die Altstädte, wir lieben die «Schönschweiz». Aber wir produzieren immer mehr «Gebrauchsschweiz». Die Zersiedelung ist das Kernthema aller Publikationen des Verlags Hochparterre.
Gestalten tun den Raum das Künstlerpaar Beat Klein und Hendrikje Kühne. Klein und Kühne schneiden Häuser aus Hochparterre-Heftli der letzten 22 Jahre aus und setzen sie zu einer raumgreifenden Collage mit überraschender Tiefe und Dynamik zusammen. Die Collage wächst über die gesamte Dauer der Ausstellung und wird fast täglich erweitert.
Eine täglich aktualisierte Bildergalerie dokumentiert das «Wachstum» und zeigt, wie das Zimmer langsam aber stetig zugekleistert wird.

Text: Roderick Hönig, Fotos: Markus Frietsch

Installationsansicht: Villa Mainau, Zürich, 2011

This exhibition project was conceived partly as a reaction to the situation of Sølyst Artist in Residence Center in a park as it offers the chance to actually be in an man made ideal landscape in contrast to looking at it from the outside.

The exhibition in Sølyst castle consits of three works of art:

- A picture-collage with thousands of fragments from reproductions of art historical masterpieces, representing a great detailed paradisiac landscape. With a composition of a crowd of motives, which comment on historical as well as art historical events, myths, the good and the evil and life's cycle.

- A hedge of birds. Different bird species are cut out of bird watching magazines. Thin wood laminate is pasted on card and the birds are combined after the same system used by Charles and Ray Eames for their House of Cards. The Hebrew word for paradise' Pardes' actually means hedge, so we may ask ourselves if separating us from somebody and excluding a group of people from their society as such is our definition of Paradise? Are we in a position to look for this state of mind without building up a separation between us and the surrounding world?

- The work  “ARTIFEX SEMPER BEATUS EST” has a Latin name which means: The artist is always blessed. On a small screen you see pictures of various summer flowers, all found in the grass around Sølyst along with their Latin names and the name of the artist Beatus in a fictitious Latin version. At the same time birds are heard chirping, and if you listen carefully you understand that it actually is Beat Klein, who whistles the sound aspect of the work.

(from press text by Tine Bungaard Quedenbaum, curator SAIR Sølyst)

Installation view: project space Sølyst Castle, Jyderup/Denmark, 2008

On the menu there is a list of ten sentences conjuring up every-day superstitions the likes many people create. They are a playful attempt to influence the course of things by fabricating connections between one's own doing and the things one usually cannot influence in order to exert control over the contingencies of life.

> If I manage to reach the top of the stairs before the door shuts, I’ll win the lottery.

> If I manage to throw the paperball right into the waste basket, I’ll become famous.

Project for Polarcap Edinburg/Dunbar, 2007
25 menues, folded and laminated, each 21 x 29 cm

Installation with cut out car pictures. By creasing them, the pictures are transformed into coloured paper balls. These paper balls are laid out on the floor of the gallery in the shape and pattern of a mandala.

Installation view in M'ARS Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow, 2007
Diametre: 500 cm

"For this exhibition Hendrikje Kühne and Beat Klein adopted the roles of collectors and recyclers of objects found among the daily flood of images. They sifted through countless mail-order catalogues, brochures and magazines in search of images of saleable goods which they cut out and stuck to cardboard. These objects were assembled to produce an installation in the shape of a floor mandala. There is just enough room to walk around it, which is when it reveals its full range of colours. A mandala is a visual meditation aid commonly used in Eastern religious practices; combining meditative and didactic elements, its contemplation provides training for the viewer's faith and imagination. Working on a mandala also makes one receptive to the potential transformation of matter into spirit. The project is complemented by the inventory Index™ naming all the items used in the installation."

(From: Gott sehen, exhibition catalogue, text by Dorothee Messmer, exhibition curator, Kartause Ittingen, art museum of the canton Thurgau)

Installation view in the Kartause Ittingen, 2005
Diameter: 400 cm

See also: web.mac.com/kuehne.klein

From discarded shopping-lists found in and around supermarkets we created 83 „potraits“ of anonymous shoppers by means of handwriting analisys and the psychological effect of colours. Many of the locations appear several times according to their popularity. This map therefore is a reflection of wishes and ideals rather than reality.
Do you go for tomatoes? You might tend to be melancholy.


Installation view, staub (g*fzk!) Zürich, 2004
Portrait 37, collage, inkjet print, 29.7 x 21 cm

The stickers for the Hohe Heide Sticker book show various photographs of the Hohe Heide, a region in Northern Germany, that were taken at selected locations during a stay there in 2003. The texts in the book are meticulous observations of the same locations - all of which have some reference to the act of observing in general - and of the more or less mundane incidents that occured there at a certain time:

13.42 A white butterfly is fluttering about two meters above the field. On the left, a faint rumble can be heard in the distance.

13.45 A gentle breeze is blowing. The branches of the trees on the edge of the forest are swaying slightly. From: Auf dem Hochsitz (On the raised hide)

The stickers and the books were sold during the exhibition Kühne / Klein FOKUS 1 at the Kunstverein Springhornhof and at some other outlets in the region. At the end of the exhibition a sticker exchange event was held at the Kunstverein facilitating the swapping of doubles. During this occasion, the artists also signed the complete sticker books , turning them into original pieces of art.

Note in Kunst Bulletin

Review by Dr. Francis Halsall in CIRCA 113/2005 about Kühne/Klein at Sirius Arts Centre Cobh: The Cobh and Cork Sticker Book Project

"In this new work, the holiday brochure imagery, combined in this assemblage form, might suggest the endlessly proliferating sprawling holiday-complexes that colonise holiday destinations such as the Mediterranean seabord. But it also constructs an alternative map of the world, one based not di lrectly on political geography or physical terrain but rather on the consumption of holidays and leisure travel. Mapping territory is of course a complex exercise, prerogative, and requirement of power. It serves many possible agendas. Mapping is but one activity of imaging space, place and movement through space and place. The archiving of photographic imaginery of "the landscape" or "local attractions" is another aspect of this imagining of place, and thus also for exercising power. The work thus introduces a political economy of fantasy, of imagining and of leisure".

Mick Wilson (2001), artist, writer and lecturer at DLIADT

Review by Niamh Ann Kelly in CIRCA 98/2001

Installation view in the Kunstverein Hannover, 2003
1000 x 1200 x 25 cm, 2001

Installation view CAC Vilnius, 2002, 8th Baltic Triennial of International Art

"Property" is made of all the pictures of advertised houses from the weekly Property Supplement of the Irish Times. During a four months period, while staying on the Artists' Work programme at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1998, those pictures were cut out every thursday when the supplement appears, mounted on board and put together in a rectangular system. The result is a composition of an urban landscape which grew by the week by the number of properties for sale. While the shape is completely arbitrary the size of the sculpture is a materialization of our four months' residency. In theory however, it could grow endlessly, as long as the property market in its present form exists. Property is now in the collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.

Review by Bernice Harrison in Property, a supplement of the Irish Times, 26 November 1998

"Property"
Installation view in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2002

This brochure contains a collection of statements regarding the property issue by people from Dublin. It resulted from the manifold reactions of people to our work "Property". The statements are accompanied by 16 black and white photographs, which illustrate the making of "Property".

"Property" (Letters to the Editor)
brochure 11cm x 15cm, english, 34 pages, 16 black and white photographs by the Kuehne/Klein, 16 statements, 1 D.I.Y-multiple, 1998

We divided the abundance of picture material that had been gathered in the creating process of "Cars" into two different parts. One was used to create the sculpture, the other, however, a choice of precious contributions of the collectors (the friends and relatives who helped us collect the car pictures) was categorized and presented on brackets and in glass cabinets. These finds give an insight not only into the way cars are advertised but also into the individual interpretations of the search item.

"The Collection"
5 brackets and 2 glass cabinets with collected items, 1999