There is a stone emblem above the entrance to the gallery with the inscription “Fest und Streng” (Solid and Stern). One could read this as a kind of architectural leitmotif for the bourgeois villa with its Art Nouveau forms, built at the turn of the 20th century. Corbels and volutes also accompany the visitor in the stairwell before these insignias are lost to the idea of spaces oriented toward the ideal exhibition space.

The Corner Piece (Eckstück), a contribution to the thematic exhibition “Ab in die Ecke!” (Off into the Corner), was executed in precisely this through space of the stairwell. The Corner Piece, very similar to the “Black Square” by Kasimir Malevich in his first exhibition in 1915, the Corner Piece hangs in the upper corner of the room on the second floor. Developed from the enlargement of a corner protector on a scale of 20:1, or what can also be described as a cut through three corners of a “black cube,” it is part of a functional-constructive aesthetic that strongly contrasts with the villa’s architectural scheme and has superseded it in terms of history.

The Corner Piece adheres to the coordinate phenomena of Western architecture and intersects the function of a door and a socket strip. Viewed from certain perspectives, however, its edges visually dissolve due to the lighting and the deep black. What then emerges is a corner without readable coordinates whose spherical triangle no longer has a structuring but a supporting function.

Material:  MDF painted, 204 x 204 x 204 cm