The Neue Nationalgalerie shows parallel exhibitions by Tehching Hsieh and Gerhard Richter. With his long-term performances, Tehching Hsieh has had a decisive influence on media and performance art since the 1970s, while Gerhard Richter has influenced contemporary painting over the past decades through his pictorial practice. Both exhibitions mark turning points in the understanding of art in the twentieth century.

Neue Nationalgalerie presents Tehching Hsieh’s work One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece). Born in 1950 in Nanzhou, Pingtung, Taiwan, Hsieh became known internationally in the late 1970s and early 1980s primarily for his durational performances, each of which ran over a year. The film and photo installation at the Neue Nationalgalerie shows the performance, in which the artist photographed himself punching in on a time clock every hour for a year. The sleep deprivation thus caused provoked a kind of delirium, causing a number of photographs to fail.

At the end of the performance, Hsieh put together a film out of the individual images, which was exhibited in 2009 at MoMA in New York. Hsieh’s work was featured in the Taiwanese Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, and he has had solo exhibitions at the Modern Museet in Stockholm (2016) and the Tate Modern in London (2017–18) as well as the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009).

Curators

The exhibition is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, director of Neue Nationalgalerie and assistant curator Lisa Botti.

A special exhibition by the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin