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2002
wall drawing
spray paint and ink on wall
3.2 x 6 m
forever and a day Büro, Berlin, DE
Between 2002 and 2005, Mariola Gröner and Ben Cottrell organized a series of exhibitions in rapid alternation in a storefront on Berlin-Kreuzberg’s Schlesische Straße. The exhibition space, a former office, had remained virtually unaltered. Holdover fixtures, faux-wood wall coverings, and old wallpapers had been left in place. In this atmospherically charged situation, a wall painting was conceived that, though site-bound and hence of limited existence in time, distinctly contrasts with the environment. On the room’s largest wall, from which the wallpaper had been roughly stripped, two ledges delimited a portrait-format field that was filled with wall plaster. In the image area thus segregated from the wall, a landscape was realized in ink, acrylic, and spray lacquer. The abstract formulae of brushstrokes and traces of paint trickling down are here integrated as clouds and rain into a pictorial space whose most stable motif are the steps of an amphitheater in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg’s Mauerpark. The self-reflective painterly vocabulary is integrated into an autonomous pictorial illusion that nonetheless remains tied to its site in the real space. After the painting had been completed, the wall to the left and right of the image area was painted, over the remaining shreds of wallpaper, in a dark gray.