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2006
drawing:installation
wall drawing, mixed media on paper
3.4 x 16 m
Städtische Galerie Nordhorn, Nordhorn, DE
The gallery of the city of Nordhorn is located in an old textile mill, one of the oldest industrially constructed concrete vault buildings, into which two simple pavilions have been inserted to create exhibition spaces. For an exhibition of wall works curated by Roland Nachtigäller, a work was designed for two walls of the larger one of these two pavilions. Prepared on paper in the studio, the work was subsequently affixed to the wall and then finished on the site. Drawing on the structure of the wire mesh cage in PLAYGROUND, where the fence marks the site of the pictorial surface but at once also visually dissolves the resistance of this site, opening the real wall toward the indefinite void beyond the appearance of the cage, this cage structure was here folded into the imaginary visual space. Each wall is traversed by two rows stacked one on top of the other of four cages each. While one wall, realized entirely in shades of gray, depicts only the front panels of the cages, simultaneously opening and closing the pictorial surface, the front panels of the cages on the other wall, kept in blue, are complemented by side and back panels to form closed cages on square footprints. The perspective construction, especially of the receding wire mesh fencing of the side panels, required the aid of a computer. A virtual model was created on the basis of which the views from different vantage points—the cages in one row share a horizon, but are oriented toward different lateral perspectives—could be realized and then transferred, using a projector, onto large sheets of paper, which were affixed to the wall on site. Yet this computer-and-projector aided design prepared only the receding side and the diminished back panels. On the site, the front panels of the cages were drawn, as always to scale, on transparent tissue paper; the space of the cages was thus ‘closed,’ step by step, toward the beholder’s real space.