The Goethe-Institut New York is proud to announce Künstlerhaus Stuttgart as the third partner to collaborate with its satellite exhibition space for contemporary art, Ludlow 38, on the Lower East Side. After the Kunstverein München and the European Kunsthalle Cologne, the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (founded in 1978) represents another institutional model, coming from the German context, initially based on artistic self-organization. For the first exhibition, curators Axel Wieder and Tobi Maier present works of artists that originates from diverse socio-political investigations and creates a tension between abstraction and concrete social circumstances. Abstract Derive departs from an earlier commission of New York based artist Cristóbal Lehyt at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart in 2008, for which the artist produced a large-scale model of the city of Stuttgart and portraits of its citizens that approach the question of subjectivity through the practice of drawing. This was used as a point of reference to create a group show investigating questions related to the specificity of site and the politics of abstraction, as an attempt to mediate a relationship between history and representation.