Artist Enrique Martinez Celaya debuts Schneebett, a major installation inspired by Beethoven’s illness and subsequent death in Vienna, originally created for the Berliner Philharmonie.
Schneebett, is currently on view at MAM from October 14, 2011 through Jan 1, 2012, reflects on and transports the viewer into the final hours of Ludwig van Beethoven’s life, was the first work of art commissioned for and exhibited at the Berliner Philharmonie since its founding in 1882. It was presented in 2004, and was shown in juxtaposition to the music of the Berliner Philharmoniker with special programming at the American Academy in Berlin. Schneebett was presented again in 2006 at the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig where it offered a counterpoint to Max Klinger’s statue of the heroic Beethoven as the creative genius. The title, Schneebett (“Snow-bed”), is from a poem by Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, a meditation on death. To re-animate the spirit of those celebrated exhibitions, Martínez Celaya created a new version of the installation for Miami Art Museum.
A video of the Miami Symphony Orchestra performing Beethoven’s late quartets will be on view for the duration of the exhibition.
The three-part installation conveys Beethoven’s final moments in Vienna, far away from his native Bonn. In one room is a bronze bed, its surface covered in a thick layer of frost created by an elaborate compressor system. Behind it is a large tar-and-feather painting of a dense, snow-covered forest. The entry to the room is blocked by a pile of sticks and branches. On the other side of the blocked doorway is an “ante-chamber” with a solitary chair from which a viewer can peer into the inaccessible “bedroom,” and experience the environment as a memory of what was, or what might have been. The Leipziger Volkszeitung remarked that Beethoven’s presence “literally hovers in the air as sound.”
Schneebett, a promised gift of Dieter and Si Rosenkranz, to MAM’s permanent collection, has never before been seen in the US. Schneebett is an internationally renowned artist based in Delray, South Florida with work represented in the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.