February 10 through June 17, 2012
Kris Martin: "Mandi"
Created in the 1st century AD in Rome, the Laocoon Group in the Vatican Museums is one of the most important antique sculptures. Already Pliny the Elder highly praised the stirring depiction of the death struggle of Laocoön and his sons, and it once again aroused enthusiasm among artists and men of letters when it was excavated in Rome in 1506.
Kris Martin: Mandi VIII, courtesy Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf, photo: Achim Kukulies, Düsseldorf
In 1766, for example, the marble sculpture inspired the poet Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's famous essay "Laocoon or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry" that deals with the differences between the fine arts and literature. For the young Belgian artist Kris Martin (born in 1972), the probably most famous sculpture of European intellectual history is both a subject and a motif, which he modifies by means of an intervention only recognisable to the attentive spectator. The presentation of the life-sized group of sculptures in the LehmbruckMuseum takes places in parallel to the vast retrospective on Kris Martin in the Kunstmuseum Bonn.