GABRIELE SCHMIDT-HEINS: Totalität / Fragment, Stadtgalerie Kiel, 1990

Exhibition catalogue, Stadtgalerie Kiel, 1990. Illustrated softcover; 78 pages; 22 × 28 cm; German text. Contributions by Knut Nievers, Renate Damsch-Wiehager, Barbara Groenhart, Danielle Lokin and Jan Henderikse. ISBN 3-927979-00-7.

Condition: good vintage condition; general rubbing and surface marks to the wrappers, with light edge and corner wear and minor handling creases. Internally clean, with the binding sound.

Published for Schmidt-Heins’s 1990 exhibitions at Stadtgalerie im Sophienhof, Kiel, and Kunsthalle Winterthur. The catalogue brings together installation views, sculptural constructions, photographs and text-based works. The title — Totalität / Fragment — describes a practice in which individual parts remain visibly separate while being arranged into temporary spatial and linguistic structures.

By the 1970s, Gabriele Schmidt-Heins had become closely associated with Conceptual Art and the artist’s book, working independently and alongside her twin sister Barbara. Their handmade and frequently unique publications treated the book as an autonomous artistic form rather than a secondary record of other work. Both artists participated in documenta 6 and 7.

Here, that approach moves between page and exhibition space. Architectural fragments, linear constructions and statements such as ZEIT WERK / immortal / I’m mortal appear as components within larger arrangements. The catalogue does not resolve these works into a complete survey; it preserves their interruptions, partial views and changing relationships.

The blue-and-brown patterned wrappers repeat a field of circular marks, interrupted on the front by a pale blue panel carrying the artist’s name vertically. The design converts the cover into another division between field and fragment, while the book gathers temporary installations into a portable sequence.

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