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2010
wall drawing, acrylic paint on wall
4.5 x 10 m
Marta Herford, Herford, DE
The wall work SPINNEN was created for the exhibition “Unsichtbare Schatten” [“Invisible Shadows”] at the Marta, Herford (Germany). Applied to two walls that meet at an angle in one of the Frank Gehry-designed building’s exhibition rooms are two complementary pictures. Each comes with its own imaginary ‘pictorial support’: as in BOXED, the bar elements used in many works have been assembled, in accordance with the rules of parallel projection, to form a very flat cage or box. On the right-hand side wall, a dense mesh of superimposed moiré patterns in gray and black has been applied to the back wall of this imaginary box as though the transparent support medium had been turned to face the wall. On the left-hand side wall, by contrast, the front of another box composed of bars is spanned by a web of similar bars, which become legible as the highly magnified threads of a disordered spider web. This web casts a shadow so that the distance between the face of the imaginary space-box and its back wall, which coincides with the real wall to which it seems to be mounted, is clearly recognizable.
The work, that is to say, intertwines several levels of illusionism. Applied to the real wall are real brushstrokes that initially fold up an imaginary pictorial support. On the right, the same brushstrokes, now in dense arrangement, form the mesmerizing and visually loud moiré pattern on the back or interior wall of this support medium, while on the left the front of the space-box is spanned by the delicate web of spider’s threads. These imaginary threads cast their shadow through the apparent spatial depth of the support medium onto the real wall, which is thus integrated into the play of illusion. Yet there are too many of these shadows—they are, as it were, most unreal element of the work—: to some of them no thread, no bar of the web corresponds. The visible shadows of invisible objects pull empty space itself into the play of illusion. It is no longer even certain that the space between the threads is empty.