»...how green are your leaves«
Installation at the "Südwestfälische Galerie" in Schmallenberg-Holthausen
(participation), 2013
with works from the art collection of Ute and Sighard Gsell (Quakenbrück) and the Schroth Collection (Soest), including works by Jeff Koons and Victor Vasarely.
»A room in the Südwestfälische Galerie is transformed into an installation that, as an abstract idea, takes up the image of the Christmas tree and transforms it with the media and images of contemporary visual art, turning it into a sensual impression.
In the middle, on one wall, gilded whorls of a fir tree with their thin branches protrude into the room. The individual segments of the fir trunk with the wreaths of branches shine like stars, forming a web. Some whorls appear dainty and filigree, others are more massive and plastically dominant. In between are drawings, graphite and felt-tip pen, which show cross-sections of different fir trunks. The work "in the coniferous forest" symbolizes the core, the inside, the middle, from here the curatorial idea of an installation with reference to the well-known Christmas carol "O Christmas tree, o Christmas tree, how green are your leaves" originates.
For if you look around the room from here, the walls reveal a staging like individual leaves on a tree or needles on a fir tree: densely hung are graphics, paintings, objects, drawings, photographs, all of which are green: abstract, non-figurative, sometimes concrete, others more diffuse, monochrome and designed surfaces, shaded or light-bright, altogether a multi-layered palette of green tones and green motifs.
55 works by 30 artists together form a collage, a fabric, a mixture of shimmering, iridescent shades of green, from yellow-green to turquoise, which merge in the eye, and yet each work retains its value and content statement as an individual piece. The staging in the centre with the leaf-gilded fir whorls is in dialogue with the green tones of the surrounding space. When the different elements in the installation are seen together, an image of vegetation, of landscape, of nature-related meaning and symbolism, and thus of tree, splendour, aura, emerges."
Copyright Text: Dr. Andrea Brockmann (urator of the exhibition)
