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2000
drawing:installation
wall drawing, tempera, marker
various sizes
Förderkoje, Berlin, DE
Förderkoje—promotion berth—was the title the artist Ralf Schmitt gave to a series of solo exhibitions he organized between 1998 and 2008; the shows were held in a very small, nooked, high-ceilinged room near the entrance to his own mezzanine apartment. An obvious idea was to integrate this highly condensed spatial situation as a whole into the structure of the work to be created by working directly on the wall. To render the room usable as a support medium, it was first subject to a complete renovation; the wallpapers were stripped and the walls replastered. Then gouache and poster pen were used in alternation on the narrow wall sections. Due to the room’s footprint with its multiple angles, there were altogether eight such sections (in a room measuring altogether ca. 2 sq m / 22 sq ft). In and since GEISTERBAHN and all the way to the most recent works, the paintings, with their reduction to shades of gray (plus the occasional decorative color) and a reduced formal vocabulary as well as the intentional and explicit visibility of technical procedures, have been pushed into the domain of graphic art; the drawings, conversely, often refer ironically to painting, to the gestural aspect and liquidity of paint. The present work plays through this mutual intertwinement in the narrow space of the Förderkoje. Finally, an installational intervention served to tie the paragone between pictorial semblance and graphic figure in Illumination and Illustration into a unified phenomenon or a scene. Viewers could see the work through the two window openings in the door, but could not enter it.