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2000
drawing:installation
oil on wood, lithographs, mixed media on paper, wall drawings, tempera on wall
various sizes
Kulturverein, Werfen, AT
Werfen’s cultural association had its home on the ground floor of a historic building in the town’s center. The four rooms, featuring powerful walls, which contain an irregular arrangement of deep niches in a variety of shapes, and broken granite floors, are spanned by massive barrel and groin vaults. The solo show posits a multi-part installation of paintings, drawings, lithographs, and wall paintings against this almost sculptural architecture, highlighting the problem of the relationship between picture and space or the spatially integrated picture. In the first room, where a column supports the vaults, 6 individual pictures mounted on wood panels (200 x 130 cm / 78 x 51 in) are set against a wooden scaffold inserted into the room. Visitors can still enter the space behind the pictures, whose motifs and techniques lay out the vocabulary developed for geisterbahn in analytical fashion. In the second room, the portfolio of lithographs ungefähr zweiundzwanzig is laid out on ‘tables’ created by resting sheets of 5 cm (2 in) pressboard on sawhorses. This arrangement uses the medium of the print to play through the theme of overlappings and cross-fades between pictures. The walls of this room were painted a pale pink up to a height of ca. 140 cm (55 in). The same color, selected to complement the black-and-white, was also used for the invitation cards: individual drawings were printed on a sheet of very thin pale pink paper then folded to produce a little booklet. In the third room, remakes of and variations on early works were mounted in the fashion of wall paneling up to a height of ca. 140 cm (55 in). In the fourth room, four pictures have been painted directly on the wall. From the floor to a height of once again 140 cm (55 in), the wall is replete with soap bubbles, moiré grids, a forest, and a tangle of freestyle lines.
From the exhibition of lithographs and panel paintings on support structures installed for this particular purpose, to the integration of ‘remade’ drawings into a pseudo-architectural composition, to the application of ephemeral and weightless motifs to the wall, each of these arrangements revokes the status of the individual picture to a certain degree. The transition from picture to background, a status every picture approaches as it is integrated into an installational totality, is explicitly staged, pointing to the ineluctable dominance of the architectural situation.