Room Service

The exhibition „Room Service“ will gather works from 1833 to today in a two-part project, consisting of a historical exhibition and a tour through the major hotels of the city. The exhibition project devotes itself to the topos of the hotel in the history of art and culture. The historical exhibition in the Kunsthalle will feature works by artists such as Joseph Mallord William Turner, Max Beckmann, Diane Arbus, Andreas Gursky, Martin Kippenberger.

In the second part of the exhibition, to be shown directly in six of the Grand Hotels in the immediate vicinity of the Kunsthalle contemporary works will be installed in a variety of different spaces, in lobbies, rooms, parking facilites etc. These works will either be existing works, for example by Cindy Sherman or Florian Slotawa or be new works developed for the setting by Ian Wallace, Christian Jankowski, Armin Linke and others.

Furthermore Hans Ulrich Obrist is invited to build on his legendary curatorial project, „Hôtel Carlton Palace: Chambre 763“, from 1993, where he hosted a show with 70 artists in his 12 square meter hotel room. As an exhibition within the exhibition he furthermore showed the „Armoire“ exhibition inside the cupboard of the hotel room, thus testing the overall interest in making a large scall show in a very tight physical frame at its most extreme. At the same time he played with the notion of showing art where it was not expected.

On the following page you will find the list of all artists participating in the 1993 version of the „Armoire“ and of the entire „Chambre 763“ exhibition. A seperate publication documenting the original exhibition will be published on occasion of „Room Service“ alongside the overall exhibition catalogue. Furthermore a room in the exhibition at the Kunsthalle will de devoted to a documentation of the exhibition.

However, it was the explicit wish of Hans Ulrich Obrist to make a re-intepretation of the „Armoire“ by combining some of the artists from the original with other younger and more experienced artists, whom today work at the crossroads of design and art. In all 11 artists/groups have been invited for this section. You will also find the names of all artists invited on the following pages.

The exhibition will take place in a room of the Parkhotel Atlantic. The room is located at the very top floor of the charming historical Hotel Atlantic directly across from the Kunsthalle. The exhibition in the cupboard will work like the original exhibition in that visitors are welcome to take the pieces out of the cupboard and use them at their discretion during their stay in the room. There will be information about the „Armoire“ exhibition available in the room. If the individual pieces need specific information for the visitor to use them, we will see how to make this available. The cupboard itself will be a regular old fashioned „armoire“, measuring approximately 150 x 55 x 200 cm. The room will also feature a work from the original exhibition by Rainer Ruthenbeck laying on the middle of the bed, a black square object titled „Leckerli“, that was exhibited in a second adjacent room by itself in 1993.