Theater Foyer on second floor, Hentrich-Haus
First floor (mural by Thomas Maas)
View into stairwell and cupola from the ground floor
Showcase on ground floor
A Conceit, A Tale of Art –
An Installation by Hilmar Boehle and Britta Helmerdig at the Malkasten in Düsseldorf
What Hilmar Boehle and Britta Helmerdig created with their indoor installation of forty-eight large coloured lengths of fabric hanging in pairs on six sets of three-armed wing constructions down the stairwell of Helmut Hentrich's 1950s building, was at least in formal terms, a scaled-up mobile. What the artists were also doing with this work was telling a story, albeit not one easily read by the viewer, of a permanent source of conflict in art.
Banners with strange symbols, drapes of glowing colour embroidered with emblems and turning slowly in the updraught, a jamboree of an alphabet was what beholders on the way up the wide spiral of the stairs would see as they passed the colourful letter pictures. The letters of coarse silk stitched onto the cloths lend the alphabet new, individual traits. To decipher them was not an insurmountable challenge; but to sort the letters and various monochrome 'blanks' into the phrase underlying the project was and is a conundrum that it is not necessarily intended (or possible) to solve:
The Story of little k and big K »