Paper architecture usually bears a regrettable shortcoming since for any random reason, a building does not get built. It only exists on paper: wastepaper! Referencing the works of Hansjörg Schneider, paper architecture describes the fruitful connection between a built reality and a material that is as flexible as it is fragile, capable of taking on a striking quality through colouring, cutting, tearing or gluing. On the paper’s surface, a newly negotiated network or fabric of the city is emerging with its structures and artefacts – variable images and new perspectives far more determined by a malleable sense of possibility than by mere facticity. The Depeschen series is based on paper cutouts of press photos from well-known daily newspapers. The cutouts reduce the raw material to a linear, sign-like quality. In the large-format collages Brickworks, the artist is showing fragmented views of the immediate surroundings of his studio – the Uferhallen in Berlin-Wedding. The basis of Textile & Territory is formed by filigree grids of thin printing paper, cut by the artist in a mechanised but manual process. The wet lamination on the strong backing paper challenges the paper nets to the limit of their resilience, purposefully becoming a component of the shaping process, in which the liveliness is decisively created only by deviating from a mathematical norm or rule.

Hansjörg Schneider (b. 1960) studied fine arts at the Muthesius University in Kiel between 1979 and 1988, as well as English philology and philosophy at the Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel. In 1987, he received a one-year DAAD scholarship for the Central School of Art and Design in London. Several scholarships, residencies, and awards for art in architecture as well as numerous exhibitions followed. His works are in public collections such as the Kunsthalle Kiel, the Sprengel Museum, Hanover and the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin. Schneider lives and works in Berlin.