'French window' is her most recent project. When the artist arrived to Palais de Tokyo in 2009, two window-cleaners were at work. With their cleaning equipment attached to long poles they resembled painters of monochrome pictures.
Curated by Bernhart Schwenk
A new project above the foyer staircase in the Pinakothek der Moderne
For more than twenty years, the Berlin-based artist Veronika Kellndorfer
(*1962) has been working with photographs, most of which she takes on her
travels. She selects details from these pictures with great precision so that they
can be fitted into architectural spaces in the form of silkscreen prints on glass.
Through the resultant images created in this way, different places become
interwoven and induce a concomitance between the past and the presence.
Anticipated correlations frequently gain surprising new interpretations.
Veronika Kellndorfer’s most recent project has been specially conceived for the
tall window at the upper end of the grand staircase in the Pinakothek der
Moderne. Its title: »French Window«.
The motif
Early in 2009 Kellndorfer went to Paris to photograph the windows in the Palais
de Tokyo that had provided the American painter Ellsworth Kelly the inspiration
for a new understanding of painting. By chance, when the artist arrived, two
window-cleaners were at work. With their cleaning equipment attached to long
poles they resembled painters of monochrome pictures. For a brief moment,
the streaks caused by the cleaning liquid broke up the homogeneity of the
glazed surfaces, disrupting the uniformity of the image reflected. Kellndorfer
captured this situation with her camera.
Art as a comparison of one image with another
The striking similarity in the shape of the windows in Paris and Munich
prompted Veronika Kellndorfer to transfer her photograph of the French
window to the Pinakothek der Moderne. In its new setting, the silkscreen print
on glass turns the interior and exterior inside out, with the window-cleaners
originally on the outer façade now being found on the inside. The museum
context also gives the ritual of everyday work a new meaning, with the act of
cleaning becoming a reference to the continuous construction and
reconstruction of visual impressions, of the never conclusive comparison of one
image with another.
French Window
Apart from the reference to the architectural term »French window« – a
window that reaches from floor to ceiling – the title of the work has close
associations with Marcel Duchamp’s window metaphors (»Large Glass«,
»Fresh Widow«) that the artist developed as he turned away from traditional
painting. Kellndorfer likewise first studied painting before moving on to more
spatially related works. The Canadian Jeff Wall’s light boxes with their interplay
of photography, painting, space and light, and the way in which the precise mise
en scène of pictorial motifs enables a new narrative style, also played an
important role.
The Staircase Projects in the Pinakothek der Moderne
Veronika Kellndorfer is the fourth artist to devise a site-specific project for the
spacious sweeping staircase in the Pinakothek der Moderne after Olaf Metzel,
Benjamin Bergmann and Olaf Nicolai. The invited artists are not given any
contextual specifications; the four museums in the building (Architecture,
Design, Art, Works on Paper), however, provide a wide variety of possible
approaches.
Image: Veronika Kellndorfer (*1962), Palais de Tokyo, Paris 2009 © Veronika Kellndorfer
Further information and pictorial material is available under 089 23805-1321
or by e-mail to presse@pinakothek.de.
Press Department at the Pinakothek Museums
Tine Nehler M.A. | Head of the Press Dept.
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