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Ydessa Hendeles: The Art of Metaphor

November 7, 2023

This month marks the 20th anniversary of Ydessa Hendeles’s ground-breaking exhibition “Partners”, which opened on November 7, 2003, at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. By invitation of the incoming director, Chris Dercon, and his chief curator, Thomas Weski, the 16-gallery exhibition combined works by Diane Arbus, Maurizio Cattelan, James Coleman, Hanne Darboven, Walker Evans, Luciano Fabro, Paul McCarthy, On Kawara, Giulio Paolini, Bruce Nauman, Jeff Wall, and Lawrence Weiner together with vintage photographs, an antique toy and Hendeles’s own works, including “Partners (The Teddy Bear Project)”, 2002.

The exhibition confirmed Hendeles’s role as an ‘artist-curator’ by making clear the potential of curating to produce meaning and by yielding an experience that transcended the impact of the individual objects and artworks on display. In 2022, Rome’s Treccani Accademia listed “Partners”as one of “Six Exhibitions That Changed the History of Exhibition Design” noting: “The assembly of the exhibition curated by Ydessa Hendeles at the Haus der Kunst in Munich is based on the close dialogue between works and archives and questions the very status of the work of art, the role of the artist and the curator”.

The exhibition also was the first post-war exhibition to respond to the Haus der Kunst as a cultural context. Built by Hitler to display art that promoted the objectives of the Third Reich, “Partners”offered a unique opportunity to re-evaluate and confront the gallery’s past, which Hendeles did to poignant effect. As the child of Holocaust victims, she reached out through the exhibition to the progeny of its perpetrators. In this way, she encouraged people to consider issues of identity as they are inherited and formed by belief systems of the 20th century.

“Partners”was presented in three closed passages, allowing the viewer to respond to the objects on viewing them initially, but then reconsider them and perhaps see them differently on the return journey.

In keeping with other Hendeles exhibitions, the presentation was highly suggestive, but not didactic. Viewers were considered partners in the exploration of meaning.“I do not provide an essay that interprets what I have assembled” Hendeles has written. “I don’t try to interpret the work for viewers. Instead, because the elements extend outside the arena of contemporary art, I put together ‘Notes’ that contain all that is required for a thoughtful viewer to experience the work without having to be a connoisseur in the various disciplines of the pieces on display. They can move to the level of metaphor and meaning more easily without being told how to think

The ‘Notes’, detailed and thorough, are typical of a Hendeles exhibition, and provide a neutral grounding for the metaphorical possibilities of interpretation.

The only child of Auschwitz survivors, Hendeles was born in Marburg, Germany, shortly after World War II and moved to Canada with her family in 1951. Her history has informed her practice over more than four decades as gallerist, collector, curator and artist, but it does not specifically define it. “My practice has also sought to give artistic expression to the multi-generational effects of traumatic displacement and the ensuing psychological and physical barriers to rebuilding community and a sense of belonging”.

Text by Natasha Pashak

Photo no. 1: Minnie Mouse Carrying Felix in Cages, R.S. (La Isla Toys), Spain, c. 1926–36. Lithographed tin plate, key-wind clockwork toy, 17.8 cm in height
Photo no. 2: The Teddy Bear Project, Ydessa Hendeles, 2002. 3,000 vintage family-album photographs; antique teddy bears alongside photographs of the bears with their original owners and related ephemera; mahogany display vitrines; eight painted-steel mezzanines; six painted-steel spiral staircases; sixteen painted portable walls; hanging light fixtures and custom wall lighting, 4.9 x 23.7 x 9.4 m
Photo no. 3: Him, Maurizio Cattelan, 2001. Polyester resin, clothing, leather boots, human hair, 60 x 38.1 x 58.4 cm