MUNICH.- For more than twenty years, the Berlin-based artist Veronika Kellndorfer (*1962) has been working with photographs, most of which she takes on her travels. She selects details from these pictures with great precision so that they can be fitted into architectural spaces in the form of silkscreen prints on glass. Through the resultant images created in this way, different places become interwoven and induce a concomitance between the past and the presence. Anticipated correlations frequently gain surprising new interpretations. Veronika Kellndorfer’s most recent project has been specially conceived for the tall window at the upper end of the grand staircase in the Pinakothek der Moderne. Its title: »French Window«.

The motif
Early in 2009 Kellndorfer went to Paris to photograph the windows in the Palais de Tokyo that had provided the American painter Ellsworth Kelly the inspiration for a new understanding of painting. By chance, when the artist arrived, two window-cleaners were at work. With their cleaning equipment attached to long poles they resembled painters of monochrome pictures. For a brief moment, the streaks caused by the cleaning liquid broke up the homogeneity of the glazed surfaces, disrupting the uniformity of the image reflected. Kellndorfer captured this situation with her camera.

Art as a comparison of one image with another
The striking similarity in the shape of the windows in Paris and Munich prompted Veronika Kellndorfer to transfer her photograph of the French window to the Pinakothek der Moderne. In its new setting, the silkscreen print on glass turns the interior and exterior inside out, with the window-cleaners originally on the outer façade now being found on the inside. The museum context also gives the ritual of everyday work a new meaning, with the act of cleaning becoming a reference to the continuous construction and reconstruction of visual impressions, of the never conclusive comparison of one image with another.

French Window
Apart from the reference to the architectural term »French window« – a window that reaches from floor to ceiling – the title of the work has close associations with Marcel Duchamp’s window metaphors (»Large Glass«, »Fresh Widow«) that the artist developed as he turned away from traditional painting. Kellndorfer likewise first studied painting before moving on to more spatially related works. The Canadian Jeff Wall’s light boxes with their interplay of photography, painting, space and light, and the way in which the precise mise en scène of pictorial motifs enables a new narrative style, also played an important role.

The Staircase Projects in the Pinakothek der Moderne
Veronika Kellndorfer is the fourth artist to devise a site-specific project for the spacious sweeping staircase in the Pinakothek der Moderne after Olaf Metzel, Benjamin Bergmann and Olaf Nicolai. The invited artists are not given any contextual specifications; the four museums in the building (Architecture, Design, Art, Works on Paper), however, provide a wide variety of possible approaches.