ABSTRACT
This chapter examines early works by artists (and close friends) Thomas Schütte and Ludger Gerdes, who studied under Gerhard Richter at the Art Academy Düsseldorf in the late 1970s. Trained by an artist whose work mediates between the avant-garde and bourgeois paradigm of painting, Schütte and Gerdes, like their teacher, problematized both the idiom of critique or “unmasking” associated with avant-garde art and the notions of semblance connected with bourgeois painting. Reacting to the entwined legacies of Minimal and Conceptual Art, however, Schütte and Gerdes negotiated these paradigms in and through dressing in situ wall installations and reliefs, which hide the wall as much as they reveal it. The conception of architecture in their entwined and parallel work needs to be seen along similar lines; for Schütte and Gerdes, architecture is not defined by function, space and materiality alone. The chapter draws on the theory of nineteenth-century architect and urbanist Gottfried Semper, who was read by Gerdes, to claim how both artists conceived art and architecture as ambiguous acts of dressing.
