Reading Rämistrasse #159: Aoife Rosenmeyer on 'Concepts of the All-Over' at Museum Haus Konstruktiv

In Ester Stocker’s A Space for Thoughts (works from 2024 unless otherwise specified) I encountered two older men sitting on a huge crumple of white vinyl scored with a black grid. They were grinning; soon I was too. Similar, massive scrunched forms hang in the air, while the same grid, flattened, covers the walls and floor. Thus visitors are plunged into Concepts of the All-Over, Haus Konstruktiv’s final show in the location they must leave in 2025. The ‘all-over’ is, we are told, a painterly principle of a composition ‘dispersed across the whole surface of an image carrier... [that] can potentially be continued beyond its boundaries’. And it’s not a Gesamtkunstwerk, which knows its limits. While a pun on all being over at Selnau, the exhibition is inspired by Fritz Glarner’s Rockefeller Dining Room, 1963/64, the shrine to which the building’s galleries inexorably lead. To be honest, I am ambivalent about Glarner’s work, not helped by the dull light in which it is preserved. On the other hand, there have been several successful large-scale, immersive and instagrammable installations – say Claudia Comte – in this building in recent years, so the strategy is a winning one.

Nearly every Haus Konstruktiv exhibition reiterates the legacy, yet tries to loosen the bonds, of the Zürich Concretist movement that sits so well with our Protestant Burghers. Here Ana Montiel provides a canny mix of asceticism, with canvas-clad columns and column-shaped canvases, and excess, in meandering videos. The only historic position, Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Chromosaturation from 1965 steeps us in rooms of blue, red and green light, a colour investigation that gains a layer from the contemporary tic of viewing everything through a screen. Unlike the other works on show, it stands independently of the walls and could be anywhere. Carlos Bunga’s Free Standing Painting (Haus Konstruktiv) hangs apart (it doesn’t stand) in the stairwell, a rhythmic encounter on each level. Christine Streuli occupies the most awkward gallery, a double-height space bisected by a middle section just a single storey tall. Streuli is capable of great things, though here – with a painted installation that includes lines like mock Tudor beams emphasising the gallery edges – she demonstrates how the former electricity substation is far from an ideal exhibition space.

Reto Pulfer, on the other hand, has taken over the third floor and leads us in like a Pied Piper with the best moves and catchiest tunes. We enter through a low-slung tunnel, out of which to be birthed, or maybe squeezed like curds – the walls of this section are cheese muslins – into a second space with a rudimentary tent dyed with turquoise and cornflower patches. Pulfer’s entire piece is entitled Zustand Urgeflecht (something like ‘State of Original Weave’) with four such architectural elements and plenty more bits and bobs besides. None of the tents has a rigid structure, they hang from the walls and beams, not just using the space but taking possession of it. (Nedko Solakov has already left the building.) Most parts are sewn together from found cloth, such as chintz and lace, though the most tent-like form is knitted, its design of intense scribbles incorporating the idiosyncratic vocabulary of words and symbols that reverberates across Pulfer’s practice in sculpture, text and music. The last structure is anti-architecture, an awning of various blues with a gold braid looping around it, which is pinned to the walls in a manner that prevents us from sheltering under it when we enter the room. This leads into the last space, a chaotic crescendo that stops outside the Dining Room. Here a long, altar-like table hosts an arrangement including organic materials, twists of grass and a finger-woven belt, while cloths and nets are strung across the ceiling, pieces of wood with drilled holes and pen inscriptions dangling down, a triangle, too, and a neat stack of white cloths perched high up on a beam, all accompanied by meandering sounds including electric guitar, bowls, voices, tapping and another triangle ‘ting’. It takes up the whole space, yet underlines its own rudimentary and unpolished structure. Pulfer pursues the kinds of dogged, highly personal aesthetic investigations that defined the Concretists, and that have brought us to 40-ish years of Haus Konstruktiv in 2024, though nonetheless acknowledges the absurdity of his quest. He’s a shaman who tells you it’s all just smoke and mirrors – and a highly charismatic leader.

By thematically placing Glarner’s installation centre stage in this last exhibition at Selnau, the curators make one wonder how it shall be presented in their new new location. Some elements of the old site will surely not be missed. A constant seems likely to remain the curatorial strategy of discovering an art historic hill and determinedly defending it. The artistic troops must be nimble and resourceful to not be subsumed by the cause.

‘Concepts of the All-Over’, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, 3 October 2024–13 April 2025