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2001
wooden construction, oil on wood, acrylic paint on canvas
200 x 130 cm each
yellow and white neon lighting, wooden panels
various sizes
Kunstraum Steinhude, Wunstorf, DE
The gallerist Kurz Märzhäuser had taken over an exhibition space in the old barn quarter of Wunstorf near Lake Steinhude, a conglomerate of renovated timber-framed buildings used for a variety of purposes. The exhibition space is divided into a main hall and a smaller adjoining room. In the main hall, paneling had been installed in front of the building’s timber-frame structure along the long wall to the left; serving as a support on which pictures could be mounted, it began 80 cm (31 in) above the floor and extended to a height of 1.8 m (71 in). At a distance of 1 m (3.3 ft) from this given wall and buttressed against it, an open grid structure made of roof slats was inserted. Mounted on this second wall were 6 pictures, five of them measuring 200 x 130 cm (78 x 51 in) and one, composed of two parts, measuring 200 x 260 cm (78 x 102 in) in total. The three pictures on the right were separated by gaps, whereas the three on the left—including the wide-format painting composed of two panels—were mounted edge to edge, rendering the question of the pictures’ boundaries acute: the two panels of the wide-format painting are legible as one picture only because a single motif, a cloudy band of color combined with a graphical reproduction of brushstrokes, runs through them, separating them from the two other pictures, a bright grove of rods and a moiré structure on a dark background. The pictures on the right take up the formal vocabulary developed in geisterbahn and laid out analytically in fußnoten und anamorphose.
The exhibition itself, the act of showing pictures, which in turn inherently examine this act, examine visibility and the genesis of pictorial illusion, is here rendered explicit as a set of problems concerning the installation. Whereas geisterbahn employs the installation as a means to integrate a pictorial illusion broken into fragments into a spatial continuum, this work dissects the means of showing into its layers. The exhibition space itself remains visible through the open grid, which also gestures toward the building’s timber-frame structure. The wall intended as a surface on which pictures can be mounted, now empty, is painted yellow. The light (from neon lamps as well as daylight) is likewise given a yellow tinge by means of colored paper, bringing the found support structure, the wall, and the element of visibility itself, light, into relief. In the small adjoining room, two panels, elements of another picture wall that has been disassembled, are set against the building’s wall. An email from Sebastian Egenhofer, a review of the most recent works, has been laminated onto them, integrating the “discourse” as yet another layer of the “picture” into the space of its visibility.