Die Familie Schneider

Until recently, Gregor Schneider has focused primarily on Dead House ur, the ongoing 20-year transformation of his parents' former home in Rheydt, Germany, which was reconstructed in the German Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale when Schneider was awarded the Golden Lion for Sculpture. On a smaller scale, on October 2, 2004, Die Familie Schneider took up residence in neighboring identical houses on a very ordinary street in London's East End. This book is Schneider's extension of that work, a document and exploration of his obsession with repression, reproduction and particularly, in this case, repetition in images and text. Schneider is internationally renowned for his unnerving presentation of normality, and his medium is the room--kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom--and the cellar. Under his hand, the domestic environment becomes the site of an unrelenting existential confrontation.