On the concept of the exhibition Introspektiv – Grüne Werte im RAUM SCHROTH, 2021
Green – a matter of balance
In search of the site-specific connection of my work for the Artroom Schroth, I saw for the first time, coming out of the train station: sky blue, white and light grey clouds, tree green, brick red over half-timbered houses, and in between: green churches, green city walls, green house walls… a veritable visual irritation.
The fascinating thing about the Soest green tones is that they consistently contain their colouristic opposite: Colour values between ochre and orange, which intersperse the summarily perceived green, breaking its purity and enriching it with countless nuances for which language has no words. This reveals the relativity of colour. It only exists in a moving relationship – although I find this aspect increasingly important as a direct correspondence to our social present. The colourful nature of the Soest green can point to much broader contexts.
Grüne Werte / Green values are not an impressionistic or mimetic treatment of the Soest green. The observations and questions in the course of the research already led away from this. In addition to the painterly colour research on site, I also used my mobile phone. This often distorts the tone, the technical colour distortions prevent a naive equation of reality and image. The unprocessed photos (2019–2021) are shown in the original image section in the automatic colouring of the mobile phone and in the standardised colouring of the printouts in the copy shop – and the real, lapidary green in the walls around the museum measures the alienations in the attempt at approximation.
The painterly metamorphosis of the Soest green begins here introspektiv / introspectively, which also incorporates the special existing colours in the Artroom Schroth. One colour calls up the next, local colours call up free tones, and so the colouristic network of staggered brushstrokes continues to form: The Soest green becomes part of a complex polyphony on small paper formats as well as on long strips of paper. Their materiality is flexible, the rolled forms not final. Since the beginning of my paper installations in 2006, I have reused the papers in new contexts, newly painted papers have been added, and the green-coloured paper strips painted especially for the Artroom Schroth also become part of this open dynamic.
The hardness, solidity, weight and mass of the stony green (whose durability is already visibly down for the count in the recently renovated, now grey towers of the Wiesenkirche; the green rock deposits are almost exhausted) appear to be translated into the opposite: The installation is created with the flexible inherent tension of the paper. In each individual element, it shows changeable forms of possibility, the temporality of the ‘unfixed’ sculpture, the delicacy of the material and almost weightless volumes. The locations are precisely physically balanced, without concealed views. Rather, I seek a non-hierarchical coexistence of painting and the means
and the means found in everyday life to install them in space, and a flowing connection between them.
On site, I am interested in connecting the ‘entries’ of the Soest green on paper with the special features of the museum space. Introspektiv – Grüne Werte follows a body-centred, empirical approach in which the visitors play the main role. The flexibility of the installation corresponds to their momentary, individual movements and sliding fields of vision in the space.
Elisabeth Sonneck, Zur Konzeption der Ausstellung. Grün – eine Frage der Balance, in: Elisabeth Sonneck, Introspektiv – Grüne Werte, exhibition catalogue, published by Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst, Soest 2021, p. 8f.