The way the works are arranged in the room give it ‘a living-room feeling’. There are a table and a bookcase, plus a television, and drawings liven up the walls.
Blinky Palermo (Germany, 1943-77) is best known for his textile paintings: pieces of evenly-coloured cloth sewn together and stretched over a frame. Like Sol LeWitt, he carried out large site-specific installations and drawings. These sketches are drafts for wall drawings that explore the relationship between form, colour and the surrounding space. Palermo’s post-minimalist art undermines the strictness and rigidity of Modernism with sophisticated humour, expressiveness and titles that are sometimes quite poetic.
Stanley Brouwn (Surinam, 1935) uses his body as the measure of all things and has developed his own system of measurement (the sb foot, sb ell and sb step). For his footstep project he recorded the distances he walked on thousands of cards. They are expressed in two different units: the length of his own footprint and that of the impersonal standard ‘metre’ measurement. He has assembled various materials on this table, each measuring one ell, an old measurement of length based on the length of the part of the human arm between the elbow and the hand.
The Nesting Bookcase by Joe Scanlan (US, 1961) is both a modular set of shelves and a sculpture. Its simplicity of form is reminiscent of Minimal and Conceptual Art, but also of do-it-yourself furniture. Scanlan constantly redefines the function of this artwork by presenting it in different settings: from museum to art gallery to living room. In this way he examines how the work adapts to the context in relation to reality and social activity. Here, Nesting Bookcase acts as an artwork in a museum and as an element in this exhibition, which Ayşe Erkmen has created in the form of a domestic setting.
In the room opposite there is a sculpture by Henk Visch (Netherlands, 1950). It is a damaged house consisting of nothing but a shell. There are no walls to provide shelter and it has no roof. Pieces of some kind of rag have been attached here and there. Yet this house is coloured gold. The sculpture unites wealth and poverty. Erkmen interprets it as a metaphor for the struggle that artists have with themselves and their environment.
Just like Henk Visch’s sculpture, the drawing by Barbara Hepworth (UK, 1903-75) is based on lines: circles, semicircles, curved and non-curved lines. Hepworth also added an ‘arty touch’ to the lines in her image. While Visch broke up the lines of his sculpture with rags, Hepworth painted over her rigid line drawing with spontaneous brushstrokes. Another reason Erkmen chose Hepworth was because she was one of the few women amongst the many male sculptors of the time, who included Henry Moore.
In the video by Bruce Nauman (US, 1941) you see a man and a woman starting to argue with each other for no reason. Something trivial is blown up to such a degree that it assumes an exaggerated importance and leads to a fight. Erkmen sees this video as symbolic of the art world, where the importance of artists and their work is also often excessively inflated. The woven plastic fabric by Katharina Heinrich (Austria, 1964) looks like a tablecloth that might have been thrown about during the argument. The room is decorated with drawings by David Lamelas (Argentina, 1946). Erkmen finds their simplicity exquisite. The artist caused two trees to appear by the simple repetition of short lines.
