We are delighted to present the exhibition Antikstübchen Nachwort by Berlin artist Christian Jankowski in our Vienna gallery.

Antikstübchen Nachwort is a tribute to the German collector, lawyer and entrepreneur Harald Falckenberg, who died a year and a half ago and was one of the most dazzling, active and influential personalities on the international art scene.

In the late 1980s, he initially discovered his passion for contemporary painting, which quickly expanded to include sculpture, installation, photography, video and performance. By the time of his death in November 2023, he had acquired over 2,400 works of art and made them accessible to the public in the Phoenix Hallen, an old industrial building in Hamburg Harburg that he had revitalized. In 2011, he left both his collection and the exhibition building to the Hamburg Deichtorhallen on permanent loan, but continued to exert a decisive influence on its program and direction. He also ran the traditional art book publisher Philo Fine Arts, published numerous books himself and published over 200 essays on contemporary art.

Christian Jankowski now approaches Falckenberg's life with an expansive, exuberant installation and a fifteen-minute video work. He combines his public work with private, intimate insights.

For the realization of the project, his heirs granted him access to Falckenberg's personal estate, including furniture, household effects, clothing, documents, books, letters and other legacies. Jankowski then commissioned the household clearance company Rümpelweltto collect the items from the deceased's home and sort them according to their usability as usual. Instead of releasing them for sale, he divided them into eleven groups according to the specifications of the clearing-out professionals and placed them in the exhibition space. He contextualizes each of these eleven groups with an advertising sign in which he links advertising messages from antique and second-hand stores with the titles of Falckenberg's best-known art essays.

In the fifteen-minute video work, Jankowski documents the removal of Falckenberg's estate and allows both employees of the Rümpelweltcompany and Falckenberg's companions to have their say.

The result is a work that pays tribute to the life of an art patron who left behind a unique collection of Fluxus, Neo-Dada, Viennese Actionism, Conceptual Art, Performance and Counter Art, but also raises the question of transience in general, of what really remains or disappears from a person at the time of death - personally, directly, in the flesh.

Christian Jankowski was born in Göttingen in 1968 and studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg. In his conceptual and media works, he uses the media of film, video, photography and performance, as well as painting, sculpture and installation. He lives in Berlin and regularly exhibits in renowned international art institutions, including the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, the Soma in Seoul, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, the Kunsthalle Hamburg, the Joan Miro Foundation in Barcelona, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the SFMOMA in San Francisco and the Belvedere 21 in Vienna. In 2016, he curated Manifesta 11 in Zurich.