From May 12 to August 21, 2016, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presents the installation The Schirn Ring by the US artist Peter Halley (*1953).
From the spatial conditions of the Rotunda, Halley has developed a multi-part installation that begins outside and extends inside across both floors of the Rotunda and an adjacent exhibition space. Covering an area of around 450 m², Halley designs an atmospheric, spatially tangible code of his entire oeuvre that challenges the visitor's perception in an unusual way.
Halley rose to prominence in the 1980s with his abstract, geometric Prison and Cell Paintings and remains one of the most influential artists and art theorists in the United States. Since the mid-1990s, he has been creating site-specific installations, primarily for public spaces. The relationship between space and the work developed for each location plays an essential role for the artist. Thus the development of The Schirn Ring was preceded by an intensive architectural and conceptual examination of the Schirn Rotunda: Halley understands the Rotunda as a transitory site - as an exhibition space of the Schirn, as an urban link between the Römer and the Dom, but also as a general, public space.
The analogy drawn by Halley between SCHIRN and CERN (abbreviation for the European Nuclear Research Centre in Geneva) as well as the association with a particle accelerator, in whose ring particles collide and generate energy, form the content-related basis of the installation.
Taking up the idea of the particle accelerator, Halley energetically charges the entire surface of the outer Schirn rotunda: Incoming daylight is artificially filtered yellow, the floor is painted yellow, and the surrounding windows are covered with large-scale digital prints of his explosion motif. The latter is complemented by other central motifs of his visual language, Prisons, Cells and Conduits, which the artist brings together in the circumambulations inside the rotunda. Drawn in white lines, the gridded squares and rectangles on a blue ground - graphic variations of Halley's famous Prison and Cell Paintings - take up the entire wall space of the first rotunda floor.
Visitors follow a self-contained ring from which they cannot see out into the open space. The formally withdrawn motifs confront the visitor directly, vividly, under the black light illumination. The feeling of confinement and hermeticism deliberately induced by the artist is intensified, the isolation becomes physically palpable for the visitors. They are restricted in their radius of movement. In reference to the outdoor space, the walkway of the second rotunda floor is also painted yellow.
On a wall-sized wallpaper, Halley presents motifs from his sketchbooks to the public for the first time. The assembled drawings, diagrams, plans, and floor plans and elevations of rooms and buildings from the early to mid-1980s provide nuanced insight into Halley's complex creative process, his specific motifs, and their development.
(from the press release of the Schirn Kunsthalle)
Further information at:
http://www.schirn.de/exhibitions/2016/peter_halley/
