10 Jun 2011

Kunstverein Familie Montez presents Monte Verità

Initiators of the project:
Deniz Alt (Frankfurt) and Römer + Römer (Berlin)

Exhibiting artists:
Danja Akulin, Aljoscha, Deniz Alt, Tilo Baumgärtel, Sven Drühl, Evgeni Dybsky, Tim Eitel, Peter Feiler, Thomas Fischer, Parastou Forouhar, Roland Fuhrmann, Gabi Hamm, Gregor Hildebrandt, Katrin Kampmann, Anastasia Khoroshilova, Bernd Kirschner, Alexei Kostroma, Clemens Krauss, Jacob Kreutzfeldt, Edgar Leciejewski, Mirek Macke, Bjørn Melhus, Almagul Menlibayeva, Eliane Paulino, Stehn Raupach, Anke Röhrscheid, Römer+Römer, Moritz Schleime, SEO, TRansnational Republic, Jewgenija Tschuikowa, Sig Waller, Birgitta Weimer, Paul Wiersbinski.

With the exhibition the artists want to build on the atmosphere and spitit of the time of the artist´s colony Monte Verità in the begiining of the 20th century.

Monte Verità (literally Hill of Truth), is a hill in Ascona (Swiss canton of Ticino), which has served as the site of many different Utopian and cultural events and communities since the beginning of the twentieth century.

In 1900, Henry Oedenkoven, the 25-year-old son of a businessman from Antwerp, and his companion Ida Hofmann purchased a hill in Ascona which had been known as 'Monescia' and established the 'Co-operative vegetarian colony Monte Verità'. The colony was established first on principles of primitive socialism, but later championed an individualistic vegetarianism and hosted the Monte Verità Sanatorium, a sun-bathing establishment.

The colonists 'abhorred private property, practised a rigid code of morality, strict vegetarianism and nudism. They rejected convention in marriage and dress, party politics and dogmas: they were tolerantly intolerant.'

Anarchist physician Raphael Friedeberg moved to Ascona in 1904, attracting many other anarchists to the area. Artists and other famous people attracted to this hill included Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Erich Maria Remarque, Hugo Ball, Else Lasker-Schüler, Stefan George, Isadora Duncan, Carl Eugen Keel, Paul Klee, Carlo Mense, Arnold Ehret, Rudolf Steiner, Mary Wigman, Max Picard, Ernst Toller, Henry van de Velde, Fanny zu Reventlow, Rudolf Laban, Frieda and Else von Richthofen, Otto Gross, Erich Mühsam, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Walter Segal and Gustav Stresemann and Gustav Nagel.