Über das Projekt

Michaela Melián
Bringing Gustav Metzger Back to Nürnberg, 2025
Steel, paper, 360 x 260 x 2 cm

Michaela Melián’s artwork Bringing Gustav Metzger Back to Nürnberg forms part of her research-based works that engage with the politics of memory with respect to national-socialism and antisemitism. These were the topic of her exhibition Der Dritte Raum at Kunstverein Nürnberg – Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft. Melián’s sculpture is a tribute to the Jewish artist Gustav Metzger, born in 1926 in Nuremberg. To save him from national-socialist persecution, his parents sent him to England in January 1939 on one of the Kindertransporte. Several years after his death in 2017, he is now acknowledged as one of the most influential personalities in the arts of his generation.

The starting point for Bringing Gustav Metzger Back to Nürnberg is Metzger’s own piece Historic Photographs: Hitler-Youth, Eingeschweißt. Metzger produced this work for his first institutional solo show in Germany in 1997. For this purpose, he had a print of a historical press photograph, taken on the 10th of September 1938 at the NSDAP Party Congress in Nuremberg, sealed in between two sheets of steel that obstructed it from view. The image chosen by Metzger shows a Hitler Youth rally in the Nuremberg stadium: Numerous adolescents who would at the time have been of the same age as the artist himself. The 1997 exhibition at Kunstraum München marks the beginning of the rediscovery of Gustav Metzger in Germany. His series Historic Photographs thematised the limits of the capacity to transmit and comprehend historical events.

Michaela Melián’s tribute to Gustav Metzger is mounted in front of Kunsthalle Nürnberg, which previously hosted Metzger’s 1999 solo show Ein Schnitt entlang der Zeit.

Melián’s sculpture was produced as part of the Symposion Urbanum Nürnberg 2025, supported by the building department of the city of Nuremberg, in cooperation with Kunsthalle Nürnberg and Kunstverein Nürnberg – Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft.

Michaela Melián (*1956 in Munich), artist and musician, lives in Munich and Marseille.