DIE VERBOTENE STADT

„Kriegfried“

Kunstmuseum, Marburg, 1988

Like pinnacles the line of drawings stretches along the wall. Each drawing a building block. Open tower crown. Precarious balance. Miniatures with monumental facial expressions. Inflated volumes. Changing picture puzzles in indeterminate tones. Fortified and defiant walls. Gloomy buildings on lonely peaks. Dull ghettos on the brink of gravitational collapse. Discolored towers on feet of clay. Dilapidated silos. Morbid stone deserts. Unsound fire temples. Withered layers of mud bricks and earth pitch. The Tower of Babel. Arrogant godlike or sullenly dogged denial of the limits of human power. Cain, the first urban man. Trapped in time and space, with no chance of an unfiltered view. And then the first strike. Lightning: the opening to the light. The confusion. Staccato of garish color spaces. Destruction of careful architectural ideas. Collapsing new buildings. Contact with the numinous. Dissolution of fixed structures. But the “genius loci”, a glimmer of hope for new foundations, for other places of pilgrimage for the soul.