work
about
text
maerpress
contact
2005
drawing:installation
wall drawing, mixed media on paper
4.2 x 23 m
Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, AT
The transparent wire mesh fence interwoven with the pictorial plane dominates playground and related works; here, by contrast, the fence returns as a—though merely feigned—object, as a figurative motif. Walking along the gallery’s walls, the beholder passes by a sequence of fence elements stretching across altogether 23 m (75 ft) of wall. Mounted to maintain a small distance from the floor, the fences form a palisade of varying height, above which, separated from it by straight white borders, a sky of homogeneous blue paint expands. From left to right, the following elements appear in series: a drawing of a fence composed of planks tapered toward the top, executed in watery gray gouache directly on the wall. This fence, depicted without spatial depth, seems to be a mere shadow of the next one, built from the same planks, but now furnished with grain and depth. Pasted to this wide section of fence are drawings of faces, photographs translated into layered horizontal strokes. The next section is an empty upright-format wire mesh fence element reinforced by a diagonal bar. Installed so as to face each other across a corner are two large elements of wire mesh fence. One has a leafless tree in the otherwise empty space behind the fence. The door to a shed follows, executed in grattage on paper, followed by a wrought-iron lattice, completing the back wall of the gallery room. The first element on the next side wall is a wide low fence composed of white tapered wooden slats set against a gray ground; above it, individual laminated sheets with drawings of plants before black, blue, and white backgrounds form a grid in three rows. On the right, a large square section of wire mesh fence completes the sequence; its frame structure vaguely quotes a compositional type Mondrian used in the twenties.
Like the objects that, being carried past Plato’s cave, cast their shadows on the wall, the ensemble stages a procession of motifs arrested in the surface that bring different degrees of reality into their planar existence: from the mere shadow to the line of the wire or bar, to the texture and flat physicality of the wooden slat. Even as drawings, these simulacra inhabit the boundary plane the originals they depict would also occupy; projected in front of and behind this layer are motifs that have fully three-dimensional bodies, the plants, birds, and heads whose more corporeal and spatially expansive reality, though preserved by the mimesis of depiction, is subjected to a double reduction by the installational integration of the drawings. The real drawing itself is subject to the fictional status of its support, the fence, which is isolated from the sky of the architectural wall.