From 1970 to 1972, Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers had his atelier at Burgplatz 12 in Düsseldorf's old town. It was during this time that he worked on the Séction Cinéma of his pioneering project Musée des Aigles. Jürgen Harten gave Broodthaers many opportunities to realise projects at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, such as for the “Prospect” exhibitions of 1968 and 1971. Broodthaer's legendary exhibtion “Séction des Figures. Der Adler vom Oligozän bis heute” was on show at the Kunsthalle in 1971, the same year that he exhibited the Séction Cinema of Musée des Aigles at his Burgplatz atelier. In 1997 the Kunsthalle held a posthumous exhibition of Broodthaers' films, entitled “Cinéma”.

During his lifetime, Broodthaers was one of the most influential artists of his generation. Today, over 30 years after his death, his work continues to be as relevant as ever and references to the visual theories and themes of his oeuvre can be found in the work of numerous contemporary artists. In particular, Broodthaers' films, which examine imagination and appearances as a means of deconstructing the cinematic image, serve as an important springboard for contemporary artistic films. His art also addresses considerations that would, much later, come to be classed under the artistic practice of institutional critique. It is only in recent years that the radical, pioneering yet poetic quality of his work has begun to receive the attention it deserves.

The Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, which shares a roof with the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and is dedicated to recent contemporary art, exhibits selected works by internationally renowned artists as Tacita Dean, Cerith Wyn Evans, Olivier Foulon, Andreas Hofer, Henrik Olesen, Kirsten Pieroth, Stephen Prina, Joëlle Tuerlinckx und Susanne Winterling who have drawn inspiration directly from Broodthaer's oeuvre. Rather than establishing loose connections to specific motifs, the works often act as hommages to the artist by updating the ideas and questions that continue to make Broodthaers' work so relevant today.

The theme of this year's Quadriennale, “Presence of Art”, expresses the contemporary as a genealogy of the present - in art forms that consciously acknowledge what has gone before by explicitly referencing earlier styles and lending them entirely new dimensions.

Kirsten Pieroth
Short Story, 2004
Gestempelter Mark Twain Autograph

Cerith Wyn Evans
Has the film already started?, 2000
photo: Stephen White
Courtesy White Cube, London

Henrik Olesen
Invadenti tortore turche (Homosexual birds/after Marcel Broodthaers), 1999
Mixed-Media
Dimensionen variabel
Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln/Berlin

At the Quadriennale 2010, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and KIT — Kunst im Tunnel will be showcasing a new generation of younger artists who studied in Düsseldorf during the 1980s and 1990s and who are now prominent on the international art exhibition scene: Björn Dahlem and Katharina Grosse.

Björn Dahlem's work, Die Theorie des Himmels I — Die Milchstrasse, will transform the interior of KIT — Kunst im Tunnel into a unique cosmos of glacial intergalactic material. Constructed styrofoam elements will be installed over 888 m2 of exhibition space, creating a sculptured universe that will absorb visitors as they drift through three-dimensional islands, towers and cliffs. Numerous glass cabinets scattered over the island worlds will display peculiar, mysterious objects that defy scientific explanation and look as if Dahlem found them out in space. The simplicity of the materials he has chosen - styrofoam, wooden slats, light bulbs and neon tubes - contrast with the complexity and unfathomable nature of the universe.

Painter Katharina Grosse, who was recently appointed as a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, realises for the first time an exterior project for the Quadriennale 2010. Her oversized, futuristic ellipses will be placed around the city centre, seemingly at random. The idea is that viewers will suddenly and unexpectedly come face to face with the sculpture-like, multicoloured paintings that have previously only been exhibited in interior spaces. The ellipses are made of perforated high-density foam and covered with Grosse's typical spray-painted style. The brilliant explosions stimulate our awareness of colour, light and space and direct our thoughts towards architecture, sculpture, images and objects.

Katharina Grosse
o.T., 2009
Ausstellungsansicht "shadowbox", Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, 2009
Acryl auf laminiertem Hartschaum
803 x 1.117 x 10 cm
photo: Jens Ziehe
© Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2010

In spring 2011, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf will be holding the world's first comprehensive solo exhibition of the collected works of Ferdinand Kriwet, who was born in Düsseldorf in 1942.

Ferdinand Kriwet is a pioneer of media art. Already in the 1960s he was creating exhibitions, theatre performances and radio plays examining how overstimulation from the mass media affects our viewing habits and analysing the language of television, advertising and photography. Similar to the fine arts, which since the 1950s had been moving further and further away from traditional disciplines such as sculpture and painting, post-war literature was also searching for new, contemporary forms of expression. Kriwet, whose roots lie in concrete poetry, describes himself as a visual poet who focuses on language. When he was just 19 years old, Cologne publishing house DuMont Verlag published his first work, Rotor. For Kriwet, language is as much about images as about words. The texts in his Rundscheiben (discs), a collection of works he produced in the early 1960s, are ambiguous and indeterminate and have neither beginnings nor endings. With no indication as to the direction the texts should be read in, readers were forced to produce meaning from the content themselves. In the years that followed, Kriwet's neon lettering, wall paintings and signage increasingly featured in public spaces. Before he began retreating from the art world in the late 1980s, he produced several radio programmes and designed a number of Percent for Art projects, including the coat of arms in the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia and a light & text column for a post office in Essen. Kriwet's influence on the art market was never as strong as the effect he exerted, and continues to exert, on other artists. Over the past five years, however, his work has been enjoying renewed interest among curators and gallery owners and has featured in a variety of shows, such as those at Ludlow 38 in New York and BQ in Berlin.

The last time Kriwet's work was on show in his home town of Düsseldorf was in 1975 in an exhibition at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen and in connection with the legendary Creamcheese club. Over 35 years later, the retrospective exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf will offer the world's first comprehensive overview of the artist's multifaceted work. In addition to the first Rundscheiben and Poem Paintings, the show will feature his audio and spoken texts, publications, film and television productions, neon works and mixed-media installations, as well as new pieces and some produced especially for the exhibition. The Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is presenting the work of an artist who, right at the start of the mass media's advances into our society, was exploring the meaning of media competence and whose work today, in the age of the internet, is more relevant than ever.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the first publication to feature a comprehensive overview of Kriwet's works, with numerous colour pictures and texts by Sven Beckstette, Elodie Evers, Gregor Jansen, Klaus Schöning, Christoph Benjamin Schulz and many others.