Gregor Schneider: Rheydt NOW
Sprovieri is pleased to present Rheydt NOW, Gregor Schneider’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition centres on Haus u r (1985–present), an ongoing Gesamtkunstwerk— a project that, in a sense, dissolves or transcends architecture—which has defined Schneider’s practice for over four decades.
Located on the premises of his family’s factory in Rheydt, Germany, Haus u r has developed into a continuously evolving structure composed of rooms constructed within rooms. As curator Ory Dessau writes in his recent publication: “Infusing architecture, sculpture, performance, photography, and video with life experience, Haus u r is a totalised, immersive, interrupted sequence of rooms built, rebuilt, dismantled, replicated, and rebuilt again over time…”. Schneider describes Haus u r as layered like an onion: opening the wrong door at the wrong moment may lead to hidden, peripheral spaces. The house was designed to be fully entered only once.
Rheydt NOW presents, for the first time, two livestream projections from Haus u r, shown alongside key works from the house. The livestreams mark a new dimension in Schneider’s practice: spaces are not only built, photographed, or filmed, but also digitally streamed and scanned. The works continue to explore the tension between private and public space: cameras, smartphones, and monitors appear within the rooms. The live streams allow no interaction and operate like hermetic films: closed, with a suspended sense of time. They offer the viewer another approach to Schneider’s secluded, peripheral and unspeakable world, now mediated digitally. The streamed works can currently be accessed only at Sprovieri. Viewers cannot interact with the stream, which presents a continuous digital flow rather than a living reality. In the new filmic work Nacht-Video (2025), the artist retraces the path through Haus u r, as he did in 1996. Film preserves moments, even when, as Schneider notes in Nacht-Video, opening the wrong door leads into interstitial spaces.
Photography reveals the conceptual side of his work, demonstrating that seemingly spontaneous experiential spaces are precisely planned. It freezes a moment within a room, acting as an additional approach to the already constructed space. The series u r 8, Total isolierter toter Raum (1989)illustrates the relationship between photographic and filmic media. The sequence of black-and-white hand prints functions like still frames from a film. The room, constructed in 1989, was an experiment in total isolation.
“Photography does what I do with built spaces, but as a photograph. In a photo, a room does not have to be recognizable as a room-within-a-room. Photography and film interest me when I cannot build the space. For example, I can photograph a room that I have constructed in different locations and present it in another space.”
Gregor Schneider, London, 2026