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2006
drawing:installation
collage, mixed media on paper on Alucore
8.2 x 6 m
permanent installation
Land und Amtsgericht, Frankfurt / Oder, DE
The wall-sized collage of drawings was commissioned for the new district court building in Frankfurt (Oder). The picture, measuring 27 ft in height and 20 ft in width, was installed on the central wall of the foyer, which extends as an open space through all floors; the work was placed flush with the ceiling. With its open stairwell and galleries, the foyer offers views of the picture from a variety of vantage points and elevations; its walls, like the exterior walls of the building designed by the Berlin-based architects Bumiller, are made of exposed concrete. The wall picture is composed of sixteen Alucore sheets. This subdivision of the support medium has no bearing on the composition of the elements immanent to the picture. The sheets were prepared in the studio so as to allow for seamless transitions of the motivic space, and then firmly installed in situ on a support structure at a distance of 6 inch from the wall. The aluminum sheets were covered with paper ground, onto which several drawings were then laminated, creating an unstable tower-like tangled structure of board walls, heads, moiré pattern drawings, rectangular white sheets of various sizes, and, most importantly, sections of ladders. The ensemble as a whole, which rises from the bottom edge of the picture and tapers toward the top, stands out against the dominant blue of the ground, a flat and abstract ‘sky.’ Due to the use of tissue paper in many sections, the material layering of the sheets is interwoven with the complexity of the motivic space. The ladder fragments, in particular, are so densely enmeshed that very little space remains to ascend the ladders. Flat elements such as the moiré pattern drawings, most of them framed by masking tape, and the white papers ‘floating’ in the pictorial plane like Suprematist fields further compress this already crowded figurative space. Scattered across the wooden board walls that dominate especially the bottom left part of the image area are drawings of faces, while others, unglued to such imaginary surfaces, float behind and in front of the ladders. Artists’ portraits, motifs from the history of art, and faces from advertisings form a multitude of individual people that permeates the chaotic tower structure. The manual transfer of the originals into the drawings quotes the effects of several image reproduction techniques. Some faces have been flattened into abstract patterns by a coarsely rasterized barcode. Others, transferred in an analogue-naturalistic mode, bring their own spatiality and depth into the picture. The cloud formed by these anonymous faces traverses the chaos of the floating architectonic total ensemble, which repeatedly squeezes space into the surface and dissolves the surface into space, condensing both, in close interpenetration, into a hybrid of illusionism and the material’s insistence on itself. The tower, rising, broken apart, finding stability only in the nothingness of the surface that is at once an ideal pictorial plane and a material surface to which its elements are pasted, is thus transformed into the blind gesture of an apotheosis. The blindness of Justice who judges ‘without distinction of person’ is reflected in the metaphor of a building in which one resident knows not what the other does.