The latest "Schultze Project" uses the space available - the front side of the entrance - in an impressive manner critical of the times. At the invitation of director and curator Yilmaz Dziewior, Minerva Cuevas created a wall relief five metres tall and nearly 15 metres long, filled with references and the logos of multinational banks.
The artist, born in 1972 in Mexico City, mixes the financial corporations' logos with depictions of mythical figures, Aztec deities, plants, and animals. The financial institutions help themselves to nature already - for example, the lion that represents ING-DiBa stands for courage and superiority, but since 2019 it has also signified large-scale money laundering and record fines of 775 billion euros. Barclays uses the eagle, the king of the skies, and is currently vehemently combating the accusation of being the fastest growing foodstuffs speculator, thereby driving up the prices for food at the expense of the poor. Another quote from Brecht seems only appropriate here: "Food comes first, then morals."
"The Enterprise", as the monumental work is called, aims to take us along "on a journey through time and space", according to the artist, knowing that more than a few people will associate the title with science fiction and the spaceship from the American television show. In "The Enterprise", various types of economies from different times and countries collide with one another: Alongside the current bank logos, Minerva Cuevas references the origins of economic transactions, hunting and agriculture. Standing in the centre of the relief, facing away from the viewer, is an indigenous person with a loin cloth, representing the laypeople. Next to them is a monkey, a snake, and an ahuizotl - a creature from Aztec mythology that lures people to their death. To the far left is an Aztec deity in the form of a bat and messenger from the underworld. Fiction, myth, and the reality of the markets with their permanent drive toward maximising profits at any expense are fatefully intertwined here. The three-dimensional wimmelpicture reveals an economy that pervades everything, and the colonial exploitation of past societies and their cultures. A stylised cacao tree represents the global commodification of chocolate and cacao as a once important means of payment for the Aztecs - as well as the history of the Museum Ludwig. It was founded in 1976 with an endowment from the married collectors Peter and Irene Ludwig, who made their wealth with the production and sale of chocolate. "The Enterprise" also stands for the "enterprise" of art as a whole, an ambitious project of many individuals on both sides of the Atlantic. The digital templates for the 48 individual elements of the wall relief were made in Mexico, and were realised and moulded in Cologne.
Bernhard Schultze and his wife Ursula Schultze-Bluhm lived and worked in Cologne since 1968. The artist couple had a close connection with the Museum Ludwig, and most of their artistic assets are housed here. Bernhard Schultze is considered a pioneer of Informalism in Germany (a movement from Paris in the early 1950s). It was a movement for abstract artists who rejected traditional shapes and compositions as well as the strictly geometric abstraction, and incorporated gestic, spontaneous elements into their art. In keeping with Schultze's often large-scale later works, the Museum Ludwig has invited artists to design the monumental front wall of the stairwell for the "Schultze Projects" every two years since 2017.