2nd Floor

Pouches of seeds collected by Joseph Beuys

Garden of Joseph Beuys

It was about half a century ago that Joseph Beuys created a garden with medical herbs and rare plants in a small town near his hometown Krefeld, when he was studying at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art in his late twenties. This garden still remains by the hand of Sonia Matare, daughter of Evart Matare under whom Beuys studied sculpture and she still remembers those years.
His early works embodies his profound and tranquil life before his active years as artist, as well as his "attention to the voice of the earth "which remains throughout his later works and actions.
This garden of Beuys became the starting point of "Empty Garden"

Olaf Nicolai
1999
Ueno Park/Tent

Shibuya/Street Light

Olaf Nicolai, born in the old East Germany, created two pieces of works based on his experience in Tokyo. Haunting the Ueno Park to see parties under the cherry blossoms, he took more than 300 pictures of homeless people’s tents made of blue sheets for construction sites. He says that Tokyo is the most unified place while it is the safest and clearest city in the world. People living in the Ueno Park constructs a small village and live in the gaps of Tokyo.
In the Shibuya Park Street crowded with fashionable young people on Sunday, he noticed the street light, which were designed after flowers in the early eighties, and started to sketch it, saying "this is the very emptiness of Shibuya. "
After attracting a large attention in Documenta X for works with the theme of "collection "and "life design "which features artificial nature, he has developed these concepts and created the new world in Tokyo.