Jenny Holzer
Installation for the Neue Nationalgalerie, 1977-2001

Artist
Jenny Holzer

Title
Installation for the Neue Nationalgalerie

Year of creation
1977-2001

Technology and dimensions
13 parts, each 4877 x 22.86 x 10.18 cm

Year of acquisition
2001

The large light installation by Jenny Holzer in the Neue Nationalgalerie is a major work by the American artist, whose work can be classified equally as conceptual art and minimalism. After temporary installations in the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1989), in the Guggenheim Bilbao (1997) and at the Venice Biennale (1990), she created a permanent work with "Project for the Nationalgalerie" that was explicitly designed for the house of the Neue Nationalgalerie , for which Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's architecture was designed.

In "Installation for the Neue Nationalgalerie", Holzer's texts run along all thirteen struts of the coffered ceiling in the upper hall of the building in glowing yellow writing. Jenny Holzer has chosen the word in her art. From the beginning, her aim was to bring her texts to the public. She almost always writes these herself. They consist of "truisms", concentrated life truths such as: "ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE" or "AN ELITE IS INEVITABLE" or "EXTREME SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS LEADS TO PERVERSION" or "GOVERNMENT IS A BURDEN ON THE PEOPLE" or "MURDER HAS ITS SEXUAL SIDE".

For the Nationalgalerie, Jenny Holzer has put together a compendium of her previous texts in English and German as well as writing a new text. When the visitor enters the hall, he becomes part of a spectacle that can be referred not least to the famous sentence in the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word".