Extended opening hours during the DC Open Galleries weekend from 3-5 September 2021.

The American conceptual artist Peter Downsbrough, born in New Jersey in 1940, has developed a strongly reduced visual vocabulary to put his work in relation to each space it is installed in. His material consists of lines, cuts, letters and the spaces in between. The line is a common significant element in his two- and three-dimensional works. From very early on, it appears in Peter Downs­brough’s oeuvre, be it in the form of a pipe or pole in his outdoor and indoor sculptures (Two Pipes and Two Poles), or as recurring element in photographs, books, on works on paper and wall pieces. The lines, either individually or in two parallels, create intervals in the exhibition space and draw a heightened attention to the space around them. 

In conjunction with the gallery exhibition the outdoor sculpture Two Pipes will be installed successively over the course of this year and until the fall of 2022 in selected sites throughout the Cologne area, starting with the Skulpturenpark Köln. The new installations of the outdoor sculpture continue Downsbrough’s international project that first began in the early 1970s. Photography initially found its place in the artist’s practise through the documentation of his sculptures in urban space. His photographs are mostly arranged in diptychs, triptychs or sequences and condense the cityscapes and fragments of architecture almost to the point of ab­straction by their use of graphic elements. In the photographs, too, the sequence and point of view mark the perception of time and movement in space.

Peter Downsbrough’s new book A Look At Time, edited by Thomas Zander and with an essay by Jean-Paul Deridder, is published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König. Downsbrough’s works are in the collections of numerous international institutions, they have been featured in exhibitions since the 1970s, and are accompanied by a series of artist’s books. 

This exhibition is sup­por­ted by Neustart Kultur of the Stiftung Kunstfonds.