in context of room, building and city

>Silent Ceilings, Rounded Grounds, 1999 / 2017

 Museum1, Museum1, Winkelbüel, Grundstück 837, CH 6043 Adligenswil, Sculptures, concrete, stainless steel, reinforcement; Curator: Stephan Wittmer; Silent ceiling: ceiling-element Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, 47x47x44.6cm; rounded ground: floor element, sidewalk, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, diameter 277,5cm; Photos: S. Wittmer

Fritz Balthaus: Silent Ceilings, Rounded Grounds, 1999 / 2017

>Silent Ceilings, Rounded Grounds

 

Adligenswil - We know them all, the museum buildings of the superlatives from Bilbao over New York to Abu Dabi: In the last decades, the conception of new vessels for art and culture has attracted numerous star architects, including Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Jean Nouvel. The Museum1 in Adligenswil is much more modest in this respect. It is satisfied with a building study and is a counter-design to the spectacle architectures of the present. A cube made of iron bars is the only structure on the site reminiscent of architecture. The Museum1 does not want to be a White Cube, but rather a living space that asks and challenges the social role of museums.

 

Fritz Balthaus is currently assisting the museum1 with a further conceptual twist. Balthaus is not only well-known for his pointed experimental arrangements and his often ironic confrontation with the exhibition company. With his intervention "Silent Ceilings, Rounded Grounds", ​​he makes the absentee architecture of the museum in a clever way: in the terrain he has given a circular form. It is a copy of a floor element from the sidewalk in front of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In addition to this, a cubic structure, which was also inspired by a large museum architecture, was nothing less than a ceiling element of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. However detached from the metropolitan context, Balthaus' "sister elements" fulfill their original function of representation only to a very limited extent. Both components emancipate themselves instead and become sculptures that enter a dialogue with one another. Surrounded by gravel, grass, single-family and commercial buildings, they unfold a singularly simple and quiet aesthetic - a pairing of critical intelligence, poetic wit and global/local charm.

 

by Jana Bruggmann auf artlog.net