KERPEN.- Haus Mödrath announced a new format in which each of its three floors hosts a different solo show – each in conversation with the others. The first edition welcomes three Rhineland-based artists – Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (b. 1938), Hubert Kiecol (b. 1950), and Behrang Karimi (b.1980) – whose works explicitly engage with their location and its surroundings.
Across their three different approaches, media, and generations, one overarching question remains: How can something appear so rich in history that it seems to predate its own creation? Even Haus Mödrath offers interesting answers to this question. Built around 1830, this classicist manor house has changed identities several times over its turbulent history, for example being used as a Nazi training center during World War II, but afterwards also as a children’s home. Today it stands alone, as after 1956 the village of Mödrath was relocated to make room for the lignite mine of Frechen – now abandoned. As the only extant structure in the area, the building has lost its place, becoming the type of object these artists explore both concretely and metaphorically.
Hubert Kiecol takes the house – and all its spatial conditions of light, emptiness, density, and materiality – as the starting point for a bespoke selection from his sculptural work so far. Starting in the 1970s, he has been distilling the archaic in ways that resonate with the basic elements of quotidian architecture: houses, stairs, windows, hallways, furniture. Yet through Kiecol’s reduced translation into objects of concrete, steel, and paint, these signs of habitation and “being-in-the-world” are relieved of everyday function, instead condensing into material presences laden with feeling. Kiecol reflectively juxtaposes these with partly unpublished works on paper, as well as the landscape in which Haus Mödrath itself is embedded.
Born during World War II, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg experienced the devastation of the war and post-war years herself. Loss and the traces history leaves behind play just as crucial parts in her work as the human desire for shelter and protection. In her first series of photographs, from 1969, she observed children build huts on an adventure playground in Amsterdam. Later, she kept traveling eastward, documenting wooden buildings on the banks of the Bosporus, the ruins of Palmyra, or abandoned Soviet nuclear test sites in Kazakhstan. With an eye that is as sober as it is elegiac, and transcending the usual boundaries of photography, she connects different places and times to render visible what she calls the “verticality” of time. The arc of this exhibition, curated by Martin Germann in collaboration with Leo Goxhuli and Harald Spengler, ends at what is now the Georgia–Azerbaijan border, where Christian monks first started hewing caves into a cliff face in the 6th century.
For the top floor of Haus Mödrath – closest to the sky – Behrang Karimi developed an intimate installation of his own paintings, found objects, architectural elements, and sound. His paintings feature passages, windows and figures that all remain suspended, as though mired in time. A personal thread also leads to Iran’s Shiraz Arts Festival, which Karimi’s father attended several times and where Karlheinz Stockhausen, born in Haus Mödrath, performed in 1972. What seemed possible back then in Persepolis – a cosmopolitan exchange between artists of different backgrounds and disciplines – returns here both as a memory and simultaneously as opening possibilities for the future.
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (b. 1938 in Berlin) has lived in Düsseldorf since 1969. After studying ethnology, photography, and photojournalism in Munich, she developed a photographic language that is closely linked to travel. Whether in Armenia, Kazakhstan, Syria, or Iraq, in China, Myanmar, Laos, or Indonesia, she always examines landscapes and places in transition. She is particularly interested in the traces of human industry and habitation, political upheaval, and the use of natural resources. Her works have been shown at Tate Modern, the British Museum, the Städel Museum, and at K21 in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, among others. In 2016, she received the Aimia AGO Photography Prize in Canada, and in 2025 she was honored with the Bernd and Hilla Becher Award. In 2020, her archive was transferred to Los Angeles’ Getty Museum, where a comprehensive retrospective will be dedicated to her in 2028.
Hubert Kiecol (b. 1950 in Bremen-Blumenthal) lives and works in Cologne. He studied at the school of applied arts and the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, and from 1993 to 2016 he taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In his sculptures and works on paper, he condenses familiar architectural forms such as houses, stairs, and doorways into simple, meticulous structures. He became known for works made of concrete in which scale, materiality, and space enter into a tense relationship. His works have been shown at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and Kunsthalle Wien, among others.
Behrang Karimi (b. 1980 in Shiraz, Iran) lives and works in Cologne. He studied painting with Peter Doig at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His work does not follow any fixed style: though figures, objects and landscapes emerge, their contours and spatial relationships remain fluid. Karimi probes the potential of painting while at the same time piloting it beyond the picture: in his exhibitions, paintings enter into conversations with drawings, prints, furniture, tapestries, and sound. He has had solo shows with Maureen Paley in London and at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, among others; in 2024 he participated in the 9th Biennial of Painting at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Belgium.
