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2002
drawing:installation
wooden fence, mixed media on paper
approx. 1.6 x 12 m
Mühlheimer Bunker, Köln, DE
At the invitation of Anja Dorn and the association April, the shared exhibition with Lee Thomas Taylor was held at the Mülheimer Bunker. This aboveground structure in the Cologne neighborhood of Mülheim is an air-raid shelter left over from World War II. A wooden fence rising to a height of 160 cm (63 in) made of planed slats ca. 10 cm (4 in) wide was inserted into the exhibition space measuring 1850 x 375 cm (61 x 12 ft); it ran from the entrance into the room and then, after an L-shaped bend, to the wall on one side. This fence blocked access to the adjoining second exhibition room, where Lee Taylor’s violently colorful pictures were mounted edge to edge and illuminated by very bright lights. These works could be seen only by looking over the fence or through the gaps between the slats. Two works on paper are applied to the fence itself: clouds, looking like illusionistic drawings of noses of paint, that seem to send slanting rain down into the void. Realized in one piece on large sheets of paper, these landscapes of rain were cut into strips of various lengths and then mounted on the slats of the fence such that the paper, folded backward on either edge of each slat, also covers its sides. As the gaps between the slats are twice as wide as the slats are thick, the picture is completely there, in a fashion; but looked at frontally, it is broken into pieces, as though seen through blinds. Only a sideways gaze, a passing glance, concludes the image. The landscape of rain, evoking associations of the view from a train window past raindrops trickling down the glass in slanted lines, creates a poetic resonance for this examination of the way we see today.