In 1998, the minimalist and conceptual artist Ulrich Rückriem designed a work that playfully contrasts with the austere architecture of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The 40 Floor Reliefs, which are loosely distributed on the hall floor like a chessboard, break up the grid of the building. The reliefs "disrupt" the structure of the hall designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969). At 120 x 120 cm, the individual panels exactly copy the dimensions of the hall's floor panels, but have porous and individual surface structures. In 2023, to mark the 85th anniversary of Ulrich Rückriem's birth, the Neue Nationalgalerie is reinstalling the work. The exhibition Ulrich Rückriem. 40 Floor Reliefs runs from December 21, 2023 to January 14, 2024.
Ulrich Rückriem (*1938) has been a freelance artist since the late 1950s and has been creating stone sculptures since 1968. Their strongly reduced forms became the artist's trademark. During the 1970s and 1980s, Rückriem was a professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He also won numerous art prizes such as the Arnold Bode Prize at documenta, the Konrad von Soest Prize and the Piepenbrock Prize for Sculpture, the most highly endowed award for sculpture in Europe at the time.
