Künstler-Theater, 1989

This room-filling installation consists of three episodes that focus on the idea of the painting as a stage-set, on which the author does no more than shine spotlights.
At the centre of the situation on the wall, in between the beams of light from the two spotlights located at either end, a large primed canvas is propped up against the wall at an oblique angle so that it corresponds to the widest point of the beam coming from the spotlight on the right. At the same time the canvas is placed so that it corresponds to the intersection between the two specular drawings on the wall, one in black pencil, the other in red pencil, which reproduce, respectively, a succession of rectangles seen in perspective from the left end of the wall, and the visual angle of the viewer’s gaze from the far-right end. A small trapezoidal canvas, mounted at the centre of the larger canvas, extends the double wall drawing so as to appear to be optically a part of the sequence of rectangles in perspective. In the area corresponding to the start of this perspective, a photograph of Giulio Paolini with the art dealers Paul Maenz and Gerd de Vries during an exhibition installation1 is positioned on the wall so as to mimic, through a cut made in the image, the moment when the artist suspends the first element of the drawn sequence.1
The other two episodes in this “theatre of the artist”, as the German title says (consistent with the language of the place where the work was shown for the first time), are made up of two large primed canvases, one of which is lit from the front by a spotlight placed at a certain distance, and the other by eight clip-on spotlights fastened along the edges of the canvas. At the same time they hold one or more pages of exhibition catalogues.

1 The photograph taken by Benjamin Katz portrays a moment in the installation of Ritratto dell’artista come modello, 1981 (GPO-0445) at the Galerie Paul Maenz in Cologne in June in 1981.