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2001
wall drawing
4 x 8 m
Schlüsselgasse, Vienna, AT
For an exhibition in an empty storefront (in collaboration with Harald Hasler and Andi Leikauf) whose previous tenant had been the laundry service Wirl, a multilayered wall painting was realized on the central wall facing the entrance to the spacious ground floor room. The wall measured 4 by 8 meters, with a slight bend roughly at its center. In a first step, it was painted gray from the floor up to a height of ca. 3.5 meters (11,5 ft), marking an image area to which—but slightly exceeding its upper edge—a first pictorial layer was applied. Subsequently, a light, low-density, open linear drawing was added, using spray paint first in a slightly darker tone of gray than the wall, then in black and then in white. On top of the cloudy space of this drawing, a last layer was added, once again with a slightly different boundary: a drawing in poster pen that illustrates the light-and-shadow relief of a gestural brushstroke with traces of paint trickling down the wall. Each of the three layers of the work is clearly bounded at the upper edge, with three slightly different boundaries, and reaches all the way down to the ground as though the wall, with the painting on it, were rising from the floor.