The Wende Museum Presents For Ruth, The Sky in Los Angeles: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and David Horvitz and New Installations by Bari Ziperstein and Julian Irlinger

Culver City, CA (November 10, 2022) – The Wende Museum presents For Ruth, The Sky in Los Angeles: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and David Horvitz, open to the public from November 13, 2022 until March 12, 2023. In addition, the open storage installation Gift by Julian Irlinger and the new guardhouse project Domestic Choices by Bari Ziperstein will be on view.

The exhibition For Ruth, The Sky in Los Angeles: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and David Horvitz documents a transatlantic, cross-generational art movement. Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt (b. 1932) is an East German artist who was an active member of the International Mail Art movement and used a typewriter to develop complex graphic compositions juxtaposing text and image.

Her legacy has been taken up by Los Angeles-based artist David Horvitz (b. 1982), whose experimental and ongoing exchange with Wolf-Rehfeldt provided the impetus for a two-person presentation exploring ideas of distance, travel, time and connectedness. For Ruth, The Sky in Los Angeles is organized by the Albertinum (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden) and the Wende Museum, and curated by Kathleen Reinhardt.

The installation Gift consists of a donation by artist Julian Irlinger to the archives of the Wende Museum. This donation includes legal documents which highlight the different ways in which property was viewed in the two Germanies. The installation continues a project that started in 2020 at Galerie Wedding in Berlin. It is accompanied by a publication from Spector Books.

From 1971 until 1992, the Wende Museum’s guardhouse was located in the parking lot of the headquarters of the General German News Service in East Germany. Bari Ziperstein’s Domestic Choices (2022) is a set of hand-painted and embroidered curtains encircling the interior of the guardhouse, which is lit from within to generate a warm glow. Rather than face inward, the curtains in Domestic Choices face outward, confusing not only the orientation of inside and outside but also the very purpose of both curtains in general and the guardhouse itself, a tiny piece of architecture intended for privacy’s opposite: surveillance.

Also on view is the exhibition (De)constructing Ideology: The Cultural Revolution and Beyond.

CREDITS
For Ruth, The Sky in Los Angeles: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and David Horvitz is supported by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA), Germany and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Gift is supported by the Hessische Kulturstiftung.