”SHOPPING” presents more than 70 artistic positions, including works by Eugène Atget, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Gerhard Richter, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Christo, Joseph Beuys, Andreas Gursky, and Jeff Koons. Besides numerous loans from international museums and private collections, major installations by Damien Hirst and Sylvie Fleury, and the reconstruction of the legendary Pop art show ”American Supermarket,” the exhibition comprises several works specifically developed for it by Haim Steinbach, Barbara Kruger, Ben Vautier, Olaf Nicolai, Guillaume Bijl, and Surasi Kusolwong. ”SHOPPING” is curated by Max Hollein, director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, and Christoph Grunenberg, director of the TATE Liverpool, and is a cooperation between the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the TATE Liverpool.

Max Hollein: ”`SHOPPING' is the first exhibition which thoroughly explores the correlation between consumer culture and modern as well as contemporary art. Throughout the 20<sup>th</sup> century, artists have been fascinated by department stores as the affluent society's cathedrals and the subtle forms of presenting commodities. `SHOPPING' invites the visitor to roam the vast realm between appearance and reality.”

Eugène Atget's photographs of shop windows in Paris and works by Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans, which convey an authentic impression of the presentation of commodities and the attitude towards life around the beginning of the 20^th century, make up the prelude to the exhibition. One of the first artists turning from documentation to design was Frederick Kiesler with his fundamental studies on the decoration of shop windows. While Surrealism played with the suggestive power of seduction peculiar to mannequins, the Bauhaus explored new forms of presenting industrial products. After World War II, Pop art proved open for popular culture and consumerism: objects of daily use were isolated, enlarged, or alienated, parodied, and turned into fetishes. The sequel of Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes imitates both the mass production and the illusion of boundless abundance. Like no art before it, Pop reflects elements of everyday culture as icons of modern society establishing a style and an identity.

Many artists of that time participated in the 1964 exhibition ”The American Supermarket” in New York's Bianchini Gallery. Besides Andy Warhol's ”Campbell's Soup,” ”Kellogg's Corn Flakes,” and ”Mott's Apple Juice Boxes,” Roy Lichtenstein's ”Turkey,” Jasper Johns's ”Ale Cans,” and a number of other works were presented and offered for sale. The legendary Pop presentation in a stylized supermarket environment will be reconstructed for the exhibition at the Schirn. ”SHOPPING” will also show parts of Claes Oldenburg's 1961 work ”Store,” in which the artist offered self-made products like hamburgers, shirts, and shoes from painted papier-mâché and plaster for sale. While Pop art embraced consumer culture and aimed at creating art for a large public, the Fluxus artists established an international network of Flux shops with the objective to decommercialize art by dodging the capitalist system with their playful and purposeless products and using its distribution structures.

From the seventies and eighties on, Haim Steinbach, Jeff Koons, and Barbara Kruger would also approach the relationship between art and the consumer world in an immediate, sometimes ironical way. ”SHOPPING” shows a number of works from Jeff Koons's famous series ”The New,” in which the artist provided mass-produced Hoover vacuum cleaner models with an aura of something eternally desirable by means of synthetic glass envelopes and neon light. In his special work for ”SHOPPING,” which consists of 50 mannequins positioned along the 80-meter long front of the Schirn exhibition hall, Haim Steinbach highlights the strategies and aesthetics of fashion presentations to be seen in major department stores. The American artist Barbara Kruger, who with her work ”I shop, therefore I am” has certainly created an icon on the subject, also suggests an intervention in public space with her project developed for the show: from the façade of the Galeria Kaufhof Frankfurt, a huge pair of eyes on an area of 2,200 square meters, will watch people walking along the Zeil, one of Germany's shopping streets with the highest turnover – the caption reads: ”Du liebst es, du träumst es, du brauchst es, du kaufst es, du vergisst es” (”You love it, you dream it, you need it, you buy it, you forget it”).

Sylvie Fleury, Guillaume Bijl, and Damien Hirst number among those artists that certainly love a grand mise en scène: the samples shown range from Fleury's gilt shopping cart symbolizing unbridled consumerism and Bijl's truthfully furnished contemporary supermarket to Damien Hirst's ”Pharmacy” alluding to the vulnerability of the body and its role as a design and status object of consumer-oriented people and Andreas Gursky's analytic view of the Prada stores' cool glamour.

Due to their systematical nature, their beauty, and their suggestive power, the methods and special effects of modern shopping – the endlessness, the excessiveness, the abundance, the pyrotechnics of color and form, the emphasis on the surface, and the easy decipherability – meet with an enthusiastic response not only on the part of media society but also of contemporary art. Last, not least, the subject's explosive force and relevance to the present may be seen in the fact that works by a large number of contemporary artists such as Mauricio Cattelan, Wolfgang Tillmans, Roy Arden, Lisa Ruyter, or Miwa Yanagi center around the issue of shopping.

The exhibition includes a graphical analysis by Sze Tsung Leong, which has been developed in conjunction with the ”Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping,” co-edited by Rem Koolhaas: the analysis reveals how shopping culture, architecture, and urban structures determine each other and examines the fact that shopping has become a crucial element of modern cities and, in many cases, their raison d'être. No wonder that shopping seems to have finally turned into a power of consumer society that essentially molds its composition and identity.

more on shopping culture check harvard

VENUE: SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT, Römerberg, D-60311 Frankfurt. EXHIBITION DATES: 28 September – 1 December 2002. OPENING HOURS: Sunday + Tuesday 11 a.m. – 7 p.m., Wednesday – Saturday 11 a.m. – 10 p.m. ADMISSION: 6,99 _. INFORMATION: www.SCHIRN.de, e-mail: , phone: ++49-69-29 98 82-0, fax: ++49-69-29 98 82-240. CURATORS: Max Hollein, Christoph Grunenberg. ASSISTANT: Ingrid Pfeiffer. EXHIBITION DESIGN: Nikolaus Hirsch + Michel Müller. PUBLICITY CONCEPT: Saatchi & Saatchi. THE EXHIBITION IS SPONSORED BY Credit Suisse (Germany) AG.