The UK was the third stop – after his German homeland and the fjords of Norway – for seminal artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), who travelled through artistic disciplines as he did Europe. A godfather of installation art, he was a fellow of the Dada and Surrealist movements, famed for his paintings and collages (his constructivist Merz pictures), renowned for his early graphic design skills and continually celebrated for his poetry and sound work. 27 Senses, a new international group show at London’s Chisenhale Gallery, eclectically celebrates the artist as a kind of hero.

Schwitters considered the near-mythical living spaces he would build himself (his Merzbaus) as his life’s work. His first in Hanover took 13 years. He would manipulate his space into an artistic landscape; a sculptural environment with the construction of pillars and shapes that created surrealistic dimensions and grotto-like enclosures within; covering the walls with friends’ artwork, collage – of which he is seen as a master – and found objects. From the outside, they can be missed. As he fled Germany for Norway, and then subsequently to the UK, ‘home’ for Schwitters seems to have been a distinctly temporal and conceptual idea, as well as a surreal one.

His influential practice was opposed by the burgeoning Nazi party in 1930s Hanover, who denounced him as a ‘degenerate artist’. This is when Schwitters sought safety in this most remote and austere location: a small stone hut on the Norwegian island of Hjertøya. It has since been renamed Schwitters Hütte; the last intact Merzbau in existence. His isolated practice took on the nomadic existence of which his life became when bombing forced him to flee again, this time to Scotland, then the Isle of Man, where he staged recitals and poetry readings. His work subsequently became more organic and muted as nationalism spread through Europe and the ties with the modernist avant-garde had been cut.

In 2007 Kenneth Goldsmith, Carl Michael Von Hausswolff, Eline McGeorge, Jutta Koether and Karl Holmqvist paid a visit to Schwitters Hütte. 27 Senses, produced by Electra, is the culmination of their attempts to understand what happened on this Norwegian island, and to explore what life was like for Schwitters in this small stone building. The five artists react to a powerful, affecting idea: that of the artist in exile.

The journey from the offset appears as a pilgrimage of sorts; the hut itself a sacred space.  Following a show at the Künstmuseet KUBE, Norway, last year, this new mixed-media offering is melancholic in many ways; the exhibition celebrates the legacy, as well as the tragedy, of a man sheltering away from a former life, forced to leave his work behind, and at times his family.

Karl Homqvist’s Schwitters Hütte in Merz Box  beams documentary footage of the Norwegian stone hut into a large wooden crate filled with posters and text, mirroring Schwitters’ legacy with new media and new artistic disciplines. It is a confident piece of work, proud and unforgiving, eating up the gallery space. Carl Michael Von Hausswolff’s The Fire, a film work made in a sort of collaboration with the infamous (and now deceased) Norwegian fisherman-cum-cold war spy Selmer Nilsen, questions the audience about ideas of responsibility in war and examines further the powerful landscapes of the fjords. Von Hausswolf creates a parallel between Schwitters and Nilsen, both outcasts in a harshly beautiful environment.

The landscape of Jutta Koether’s paintings is more psychic in surrounding the viewer, blurring the differences between painting and installation, collage and sculpture. Similarly, Kenneth Goldsmith and Eline McGeorge cover walls with a Schwitters-esque collection of found imagery, posters, letters and poetry, turning the gallery in a Merzbau of their own. Goldsmith’s Street Poets and Visionaires, an ongoing collection of found material – advertisements for sex, flyers or lost animals and sidewalk poetry – is totally engrossing in its detail and its general voyeuristic pleasure. Goldsmith, founder of UbuWeb, is also curating a film-screening programme at the gallery that draws on the avant-garde treasure trove his website’s archive provides.

Kurt Schwitters spent some of the last few years of his life in London. This show, in its fitting location, is a direct and contemporary response to the work of a hero that acts as a simple thank you note, or perhaps a heart-felt bereavement card. Three years since the pilgrimage to that little stone hut, these artists perform in an astounding final homage.

Tom Ryling

27 Senses is on at the Chisenhale Gallery, 64 Chisenhale Rd, London, until 22 August
chisenhale.org.uk

Electra
electra-productions.com

Ubuweb
ubuweb.com