Christiane Möbus
Wildwechsel
('Wildlife Crossing')

Christiane Möbus (*1947) is one of Germany's most significant and successful contemporary artists. She has worked as a sculptor for over 50 years, creating installation art, concept art and photographs in which she puts the everyday in new, and in part bizarre, contexts. With the aid of powerful imagery, her symbolic and mysterious works unlock association spaces that can never be fully interpreted. Her use of language, which she integrates into the concept of her poetic art in the form of the sometimes reflective, sometimes ironic titles she gives her works, also contributes to this.

The Sprengel Museum Hannover and the Kunstverein Hannover recently hosted a comprehensive joint retrospective of the artist's work; with the exhibition Wildwechsel ('Wildlife Crossing'), Christiane Möbus now revisits the place where her parents were from. They originally hailed from Oder river region, some family members even from the Neuhardenberg's immediate surroundings, fled west at the end of the Second World War and were resettled in Lower Saxony. The post-war situation in Germany made returning home impossible.

Wildwechsel is Christiane Möbus's artistic confrontation of her own past, of how her ancestors lived by the Oder river, and of the painful experience of a divided Germany. In the exhibition, she finds images, words, metaphors that are as personal as they are universal. The exhibition topics – migration and home, transformation and origins – affect many families all over the world.

Christiane Möbus works have been shown in numerous solo exhibitions, for example at the Berlinische Galerie Museum of Modern Art (1996), the Kunsthalle Bremen (2005), the Neues Museum Nuremberg (2007) and the Sprengel Museum Hannover (2022). Her works have been presented in international solo and group exhibitions in New York (1972), Paris (1980), London (1989), Washington (1997) and Atlanta (2001), for example.

Important public collections, such as the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the Sprengel Museum Hannover, the German Bundestag's collection of artworks, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Neues Museum Nuremberg as well as the Kunsthalle art galleries in Bielefeld, Bremen and Mannheim all feature works by Christiane Möbus. She held professorships from 1981 to 2014, most recently at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1990 onwards. She has won several awards, for example the Villa Romana Prize, Florence (1978), the Lower Saxony Prize (1993), the Gabriele Münter Prize (2010) and the Hannah Höch Prize awarded by the Berlin Senate (2018).

Christiane Möbus lives and works in Hanover, Berlin, and wherever her work takes her.

The exhibition opening on 1 April will include a public conversation with Christiane Möbus. In addition, there will also be two curator-led guided tours on 16 April and on 14 May, as well as a tour of the exhibition with the artist to mark the exhibition closing on 4 June. Advance tickets can be purchased online and over the phone.