The works of John Baldessari (born 1931), pioneer of American Conceptual Art and one of the most famous contemporary artists, have in recent years, been more closely linked to specific exhibition spaces. He took up the challenge of producing an installation for the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld and radically turned the architecture of the building on its head – a first time in the oeuvre of Baldessari.

Here he consistently “rubs” the basic elements of the Mies van der Rohe building “up the wrong way”, producing something astonishing and new. The viewer is drawn into a hybrid unit of pictures and architectonic set pieces where the paradigms of modern construction are deconstructed. They lose their gravity in the undertow of the enigmatic humour of his intervention. Here Baldessari’s work can be viewed as a subversive contribution to Bauhaus Year 2009.