Ripped Off Landscape
YEAR: 1991
CATALOGUE NUMBER: 49
PROVENANCE
Consisting of the painting Ripped Off Landscape from 1977 (reworked 1991) and an Explanation Board from 1985
The artist
1991, Collection Dresdner Bank, Frankfurt am Main
DESCRIPTION
The installation consists of the following:
The painting Ripped Off Landscape comprised of 2 parts, each part being 260 x 190 cm, with a total size of 260 x 380 cm, masonite, enamel.
Explanation Board, 120 x 100 cm, Masonite, enamel.
49 sketches, 35 x 51.5 cm, paper, ink.
The installation is arranged in a narrow, long, open gallery of the bank which leads into the inner courtyard. The doors of the offices in the bank open into the gallery. Hence, the installation turns out to be divided in two places, and it consists of three ‘fragments’ united together not so much plastically (in the narrow passageway without any place to exit, it is impossible to see the installation in its entirety; and from the opposite gallery everything looks miniature), as in terms of the coordination of meanings, where two of its parts serve as commentaries on the third. The main part consists of the painting executed on Masonite and depicting a country landscape seen as though from a bird’s flight. Some sort of white, uneven pieces are visible in the upper right corner. This painting doesn’t have any particular quality and it acquires all of its significance from all the possible interpretations which are arranged on the right of it in the form of 46 commentaries – the uttered hypotheses of viewers – as well as in the short text written on the brown board on the left of the painting.
This composition, like similar ones – The Garden, The Great Axis, and others – belong to a large group of installations united by the common name of Seven Exhibitions of a Painting (they were all exhibited together in the Kasseler Kunsthalle), and they all deal with the same problem, which is completely laid out in an analysis of this entire group (Seven Exhibitions of a Painting).
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