Paris honors Hans Hollein with two exhibitions

The Hollein show at the Centre Pompidou will open with a discussion on Tuesday (4 March). The architect's son Max Hollein will also be on the podium. "It is probably the first time that an architect has had two retrospectives at the Pompidou (the first was during his lifetime in 1987), and he is certainly the only Austrian architect to have such a solo exhibition at the Pompidou. And it is one of the very last exhibitions before the Pompidou closes for five years," the director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York told the APA.

Son Max Hollein was already there in 1987

"The Pompidou had a special meaning for my father - as an icon of architectural innovation, as a paradigmatic new type of museum and as a collection that has always celebrated architecture as an integral part of the art of the 20th and 21st centuries and in particular has collected and cared for the work of Hans Hollein in all its multidisciplinarity from the very beginning," emphasizes Max Hollein - and highlights a very personal aspect: "I was there when the exhibition was being set up in 1987! My first mini-job in a museum!"

Max Hollein will be joined in discussion by museum director Laurent Le Bon, art historian Julian Rose and architects Frida Escobedo, Hiroko Kusunoki and Nicolas Moreau. They are responsible for the renovation of the Centre Pompidou, which will begin in the autumn and last until 2030.

Major acquisition in 2016

In 2016, the museum acquired a significant group of works by Hollein, including installations, models, drawings and documentation covering all aspects and periods of the Pritzker Prize winner's work. The 173 Hollein works from the museum's collection will now be included in the 13 stages of the comprehensive retrospective.

Selected exhibits, starting with his radical first designs, will be used to re-examine Hollein's half-century-long preoccupation with fundamental questions of architecture against the backdrop of movements such as postmodernism and post-avant-garde. In addition to his famous shop designs and museum buildings, his volcano museum in Auvergne, which opened in 2002, is also part of the exhibition curated by Frédéric Migayrou. In 1987, the exhibition focused on Hollein's architecture, says the curator. "Since then, new publications have appeared on his work, and more direct access to the archives has made it possible to trace his entire career, in a coherent dialogue with the most important movements and creators of the 20th century."

Concentration on the 1960s at Ropac

At Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais, curator Dorothea Apovnik has put together a selection of visionary architectural drawings and conceptual works that document Hollein's departure in the 1960s. "Everything is architecture," proclaimed the artist, who distinguished himself equally as an architect, designer and theoretician. The exhibition promises an "intimate insight into the decisive early career" of Hans Hollein, who expanded the concept of architecture in all directions - including "Architecture from the Pill" (1967).

At the centre of the exhibition at Ropac, however, is the sculptural model "Hanging City Structure with Traffic Junction (1962/1963), which was first shown in Hollein's show at the Galerie nächst St. Stephan. "A futuristic city made of metal seems to float above a concrete base, designed in a vocabulary of intersecting straight lines and whose cantilevered wings appear overpowering," says Apovnik about Hollein's attempt to bundle and direct "urban energy": "The intersection is defined as the essence of the urban."

(SERVICE - "Hans Hollein. transFORMS", exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, 5 March to 2 June, . "Hans Hollein. Works from the 1960s", exhibition at the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais, 1 March to 31 May, )